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Qik as mud: Skype adds self-destructing video messages years too late

42 seconds in heaven (or hell)

Apps to record and share short video messages are ten a penny – and now Microsoft has thrown its hat into the ring with Qik, an app that came along with its Skype purchase.

"A small team of Skype designers and developers recently took up the challenge to build a new app to run alongside Skype and provide an ongoing form of video chat," said Dan Chastney and Piero Sierra on Skype's Big Blog.

"They knew they had to create something mobile and lightweight, as spontaneous as messaging but as intimate as calling. And it had to be fun and easy to use. What they created was Skype Qik."

Qik works on Google Android, Apple iOS, and Windows Phone gadgets. Users take video clips of up to 43 seconds and, over the internet, share them with friends running the software. All videos are deleted after two weeks and aren't stored on Skype's servers.

The videos can be sent to multiple people simultaneously, who can reply in kind if they have Qik installed. If not, they get a text message with details about how to download it – and how long before malware users start spoofing those messages El Reg wonders.

Youtube Video

Users can also records five-second GIFs, dubbed Qik Flik, to use if they are offline as an answering service of sorts. But you can only use these on Android and iOS – apparently it's going to take a couple of months to get this sorted on Windows Phone.

Skype bought Qik back in 2011 for $100m and marketed it as a simple video chat app. But as Snapchat and a host of other firms started having success with short-lived picture and video apps, Microsoft decided to get in the game with this new software.

Whether or not the Skype co-branding will convince people to drop Snapchat remains to be seen – although the recent security scare might do more to help Microsoft in this regard. It would have been interesting to see how the market had developed had Skype been quicker off the mark. ®

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