Om Malik today posted on his blog marveling at the sheer size of Skype, particularly in the context of all the social media destinations that we herald as behemoths that’ve crossed over into the mainstream like Facebook, Twitter and others.

We all marvel at Facebook and its number of users, which at last check stood at around 400 million. For context, consider Skype, which at the end of the fourth quarter of 2009 had 560 million registered users, a data point Skype’s chief technology strategist, Jonathan Rosenberg, shared with the attendees of the eComm conference currently under way just south of San Francisco.

It harkens back to a post John Furrier put out back in January, in which he stated he was “very bullish” on Skype. In that post, John shared the scuttlebutt that Skype was tracking towards a full 800 million users, an incredible number (almost a tenth of the world’s population!).

From John’s post:

I think that Skype has a bigger opportunity than Facebook and Twitter if they leveraged their core product and user base to go after new markets like the Social Real Time Web. I agree with Jeremy above – Skype is positioned in "real" terms.

While all the hype with social networks, social media, social gaming, and social currency goes "supernova", Skype is actually dominating "real social networking" and "making real money".  Their installed base number are ridiculous – I’m hearing on track for 800m users.  The product and market opportunities for Skype are intoxicating.