How to swap contacts?

File transfer is one of several actions you can carry out on an individual basis. You can also send a list of contacts to other users. Simply choose the Send Contacts menu item and then select the contacts you want to send. Of course, your contacts must authorize your chat partner before he or she can see their online activity, but this process is much more efficient than flipping through the old Rolodex for phone numbers. Another useful feature of a Skype chat is having each participant’s profile on hand.

There may be members of the group you have never met. Their profile can contain useful information such as where they live, a Web site for their business, and a phone contact. The old problem of trying to remember everyone’s name and what he or she does for a living is greatly alleviated by having access to a profile to review while you’re on the chat. Transferring files and swapping contacts holds enormous potential for efficient workflow. In writing this book, we took advantage of these capabilities, even when we were sitting in the same room. Sometimes the files popped up faster on our screen than we could have handed them to each other across a table. Large files took longer, but after each file was sent and received, we were all on the same page — literally.