Transform your chats from words in a chat window to a document or presentation by selecting all the messages, copying them, and then pasting them into a text editor. These documents retain the messages, timestamps, and author of each statement. Some skypers have turned their chats into RSS feeds and podcasts, passed them through text-to-speech programs to make them audible, or even used them as captions for a movie illustrating the chat topic.
Transcripts of chat sessions are on your hard drive. If you switch machines, such as between home and office, the session is associated only with the machine you were using. If you need to have the transcripts, Skype contacts, and in fact all your files centralized in one place, you can run Skype “on a stick” (see Chapter 9 for more information on USB Smart Drives, which are thumb-sized drives that have enough capacity to contain the Skype program and all your personal Skype information).
In a way, Skype conference chats are efficient in that they save all the information in the exact language each person used. All the statements, re-statements, corrections, corroborations, statistics, Web links, and even emoticons are frozen in time. You can relive the whole experience as many times as you want (which we call an added benefit, for the purposes of this book). To collect bits and pieces from this massive conversation, right-click in the message window and click Find to open the Find dialog box. You can search by word, time, or Skype Name. Because the chat may go on for pages and pages, the Find utility lets you search up or down (from the end or the beginning of the chat).
To find a specific chat, select the Chat History tab and scroll down to pick a topic or first sentence, date, or contact; then, double-click to reopen the chat.
All chats are archived. It is a default setting in Skype to save every last bit of chat history. You are not forced to do this, and turning off the chat history is a privacy feature (to the extent that chatting is a private act). But the idea that everything you write, and everything everyone writes to you, can be saved, published to an RSS feed, added to a blog, or just printed, outrivals the most ambitious diary ever written.
Preserving your chats “forever” is easy. Choose Tools➪Options➪Privacy and
select Forever from the pop-up menu that appears. Of course, you can also
choose No History, 2 weeks, 1 month, or 3 months, but there’s something to
be said for having the ability to save your words forever (or at least until you
get a new computer). In the same Privacy window, you can click Clear Chat
History and wipe out your entire archive. The catch is, your chats probably
exist on someone else’s computer, and maybe that person is an avid chat collector.
Chats are saved locally, not on any central server. All chat participants
have equal-opportunity archiving capability.
A Skype chat can last forever. A group of chatters, passionate about a particular topic, can form a chat club, forum, or special interest group. If they bookmark the chat, then each time someone writes a new comment all participants are instantly notified in their chat taskbar, even if all the chatters have closed their chat windows. In fact, when a new message is added, all the bookmarked chats “wake up.” To make a chat an ongoing chat, each member of the club must leave his or her Skype software running. The best part is those 3:00 a.m. epiphanies when all the points you wished you’d made in the middle of the chat come to you. Now you have an audience.
Chats persist. That is, they don’t necessarily disappear when you leave them; they come back when you call them; and they can go on and on. In contrast to other instant messaging systems, Skype chats are like social diaries. They record and remember everything you wrote and everything written to you unless you make an effort to eliminate them by clearing windows or limiting how long they are saved in history. Read on for more about saving and deleting chats.
