More growth ahead for Skype. The new callerID feature in North America eliminates a huge roadblock.

The lack of callerID when calling a landline or a mobile phone has always been one of the two or three drawbacks to using Skype as a standard "telephone" in the North America. As of yesterday, that problem has gone away. A Skype user can now choose whether to display a mobile phonenumber or an "online number" (a.k.a. SkypeIN number).

If past experience is any guide, the advent of a feature as important as the ability to display a callerID should result in a spurt of growth as people reassess their telephony options. Things have been pretty quiet for Skype since February, so the improvement is coming at an opportune moment.

UPDATE: Friday June 6th. The surge is already taking place. At 1500 GMT today, we witnessed a new record for a Friday with nearly 11.8 million online concurrently. 200,000 new Friday users that had never been seen before were in the Skype cloud. It will not be surprising if the number of "real users" grows by more than a million this month (June). At that rate, with real users totaling 33-34 million, Skype's YTD growth will be double last year's pace.