Skype could have a huge amount of value as part of Google. Maybe even as much as eBay offered in the beginning, but certainly a lot more than it has produced for the auction provider. Google has made it obvious that it wants to move into mobile with Android, it’s financing wireless initiatives — voice calling either on the PC or on a mobile makes sense as a place for Google to go, if only because it could integrate the app not just with Google Talk but with its core search business and its money-spinning keyword ad business. Let’s hope this one actually comes true.

The website says that Atomico was founded by Zennstrom, Friis and their friends Mattias Ljungman and Geoffrey Prentice. Its investments so far include Joost, Last.fm — which was bought by CBS earlier this year for about $380-million — as well as FON, Wunderloop, Jott.com, Xobni and Technorati (I wonder how that last investment is panning out. Oh well; easy come, easy go). Atomico is also an investor in DECA, a “digital entertainment studio” founded by a couple of guys from Sony Pictures.

In true contrarian fashion, my friend Paul Kedrosky says that all the breast-beating about eBay overpaying for Skype is overdone:

“Ebay is still motoring along, and this is lots of reason to be optimistic about the auction company’s future.

Over-focusing on the lamentable (and long past) Skype deal strikes me as a mistake.”

As I said in a comment on Paul’s post, I disagree. eBay may very well be motoring along, but the purchase of Skype was an error in judgment, and a fairly expensive one at that. I realize that a $1.4-billion writedown is small beer for eBay, but the fact that the company made such a decision — without any compelling synergies or anything else to justify the price — speaks volumes about the leadership of the company as far as I’m concerned (as usual, John Paczkowski has the best headline).

It’s nice for Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis that they not only get a big chunk of that $530-million earnout, but they can now get on with their lives (and with Joost, which launched as a no-invite-required app today) and quit trying to force some kind of fit between Skype and eBay — a fit I’m willing to bet they never saw either, although Niklas defends the deal in an interview with Thomas Crampton (Janus writes about it here).

As for eBay? Henry thinks they should sell Skype to Yahoo or Microsoft or someone like that, and he might just be right. Jeff Nolan thinks the company should turn it into a backend service-type offering, a la Amazon’s EC2.

“The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update. The high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources.”

But the real culprit seems to be the company’s own software, which handles the provisioning of services across millions of individual PCs. Apparently the simultaneous restarts led to a wave of login requests and that — combined with a flaw in Skype’s network-management software — caused the failure:

“This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.

Normally Skype’s peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly.”

The chief technology officer of SightSpeed argues that the event Skype experienced shows the flaws in its P2P network structure. Instead of relying on its own servers, Skype’s network uses some of its users’ individual PCs as “SuperNodes” to handle the traffic flow of data. The loss of any significant number of those SuperNodes, he argues, can cause a substantial disruption.

It should be noted that SightSpeed — which uses a P2P network structure with central servers instead of SuperNodes — is a competitor of Skype’s, and is offering any disgruntled Skype users a special trial of its premium services. And as one commenter on the post notes, SightSpeed’s model is also far from immune to outages, and arguably less robust because it depends on the company’s servers alone to handle traffic.

Nevertheless, the outage has no doubt caused more than one Skype user to wonder about the network that the service is based on. There is a comment on one of Om Malik’s posts that appears to be from someone with knowledge of the Skype SuperNode problem.