I was just chatting with my friend Farrell on IM. The “International Man of Mystery,” is currently in Turkey. Our conversation got a little cumbersome for texting, so we decided to shift to Skype video.
I fetched a webcam from my office, brought it downstairs and plugged it into a USB port on the laptop. When I started Skype, it recognized the camera. As soon as I hit the ‘send video’ link, it did. This is reasonably painless.
I’ve never really been impressed by Skype before, but it was mainly good tonight. We briefly disconnected, but linked up again quickly. Mostly, it was as if Farrell was actually in the room.
He has a Mac with a built-in camera. Set-up and operation was even easier for him.
Is Skype used much for business video conferencing? How high do airfares need to go before this program catches fire? There’s a lot more potential here and I’m probably only scratching the surface.
Skype is an interesting app, but more often than not I’ve seen it over-used for unnecessary reasons.
For example, I have had clients who, instead of sending a simple email, or picking up the phone and calling me, insist on using skype almost exclusively for all communications. I’d estimate that about 10% of the time skype was useful in a given situation, the rest was obliging someone who is in love with all that is skype. I put it on par with twitter, which is also a useful app in certain situations, but otherwise counter-productive.
Is Skype with video the picture phone that AT&T promised us at the 1964/1965 NYC World’s Fair?