IMO.IM Federates with Skyp

I was surprised to see news that IMO.IM has federated with Skype. I tried the service today because for a heavy Skype user like me, this would be a killer feature that multi-homed clients like Digsby do not offer. What surprised me is that Skype has been pretty clear over the years that they would not open up their network to federation, so I wondered how it was done.

It seems from HTTP traffic, that IMO.IM is acting as a gateway which is to say one of two things have happened. Either IMO.IM has done a server federation deal w/ Skype (very, very unlikely) or IMO.IM is maintaining a bank of servers that run Skype Instances and maintain connections into the Skype network. In addition to violating the Terms and Conditions of the Skype API, this is also unscalable. Skype 4 takes 50MB of RAM plus the plug-in manager which would be required is another 20mb. It may be smaller on Linux and/or you may be able to run the Android version of Skype (Skype lite) on a Linux box. In this scenario, you’d maintain a server running 1000+ instances of the Skype client w/ an IMO.IM plug-in. Each IMO user that logs into Skype would just have one of these Skype instances assigned to him.

It will surprise me if IMO.IM doesn't hear from Skype’s legal department soon.

What is your opinion

-tj (VP Product Marketing at ooVoo.com)