Valuing Video Chat

I haven't heard a lot of enthusiasm from the Tech-press over Facebook and Google's recently announced plans to implement video-chat into their social networks, and a recent post on TrustTommy questioned the focus on these services, when there's still plenty of work yet to be done on the basics (such as worthy mobile apps).

The comment I posted on his almost week-old post got no feedback, so I thought I'd expand my thoughts here, which should dovetail nicely with my recent reflections on my long-distance relationship, and my openly declared affection for Google's services.

Basically, video-chat is pretty much the most important thing my internet connection brings me, mostly due to that pesky long distance relationship I'm in. Human interaction is just richer when you can see who you're talking to. I don't just mean reading body language and facial expressions - I feel rewarded when I make my girlfriend smile, and punished when she gives me a withering look, meaning her ongoing behaviour modification can continue in earnest despite our lack of physical proximity.

At present, I'm in a state of transition, spending the Summer with my ladyfriend before moving onto Canada with a work permit, and even though I'm living in the same house as my number one reason for having Skype, I'm still getting regular use out of it to talk to those back in the motherland.

Before I left, I was genuinely concerned that my 18 month old nephew would forget about me in my absence, but a few Skype calls was all it took to assuage this fear. Even though his vocabulary is insufficient to hold a conversation, he happily sits on my brother's lap in front of the computer, warbling at the low-bitrate video stream that he recognises as his uncle. Thanks to the video-chat, I even get to see the pictures he's drawn of us hanging out, like old times!

The next step is convincing his father for a high-quality scan for my fridge

Moving aside from the touchy-feely stuff, consider for a moment the current state of Ireland, and the new generation of Irish diaspora. I think it's safe to say that video-chatting will enjoy a greater prominence than ever before, thanks to how accessible it will be in the years to come.

Facebook is one of those things that almost everybody who has the internet uses (including begrudgers like me), so even the luddites incapable of navigating to Skype.com and downloading the appropriate software will be able to avail of video-chat goodness, integrated almost seamlessly with the existing instant-messaging service they use to while away their evenings (this assumes that they are able to successfully click 'yes' to installing the necessary java applet). Friends of mine embarking on international excursions talked about 'setting up Skype' as if it's a major chore, so the lowering of this barrier is definitely a good thing.



The most recent video-chat development that I'm excited about is Google +'s group-video chat, in which up to 10 (ten!) users can hang out with a video feed each (once again, Google makes me happy by rolling out free feature that trumps the paid-model offerred by competitors). I've only tested it with one other user (you're still better off with Google Talk or Skype for a one-on-one conversation), but there's a lot of smart ideas at play, the best being how the main video window will change to highlight whoever is talking (or talking the loudest if you're in a rabble).

Video, text-chat, and synchronised YouTube watching (which didn't work when I tested it with Fin.ie earlier) for a group of friends sounds like a good time, particularly since keeping in touch with a large group of people is hard work. Consider the way it is today for the world-adventurers you surely know: connect to someone on Skype, tell them all your news, then connect to someone else, and repeat half the conversation - to date my diplomatic way to avoid this has been to not pick any favourites and not tell anyone anything, Google +'s hangout feature gives me hope that I can catch up on my scattered college buddies in a fun, casual forum.

Et toi, reader? Are there any features about the bold new frontiers of social-networking that excite you?

Confessions of a Google Lover

I like to think that I'm a rational creature who likes and dislikes things for rational reasons, but when I find myself openly begrudging something popular, I worry that I'm falling into the same kind of lazy thinking exhibited by 'alternative' people who valorize going against popular opinion. If you've ever watched one of your hipster friends clumsily trying to justify their about-face on how they feel about bands like Green-Day, you should have a fair idea of the type of archetype I'm trying to avoid.

Of course, even though these people often can't articulate tangible reasons for disliking popular things, they too have convinced themselves of their rationality. When I posted late last month griping about Facebook's shortcomings I was cognizant that I would be seen to conform to hipster-type, so I intended to post a twin-piece as soon as possible, extolling the merits of another popular online service.

It may be six months late, but here goes:

I love Google. I use as many of their services as I can. I'll leave the privacy-concerns to the bubble-bursting commenters and focus on what I love about what they do for right now:

For a start, the essential services are free. By 'free', I mean 'ad-supported', but not in an intrusive way.

More importantly, the quality is rock solid - Gmail is almost universally lauded as one of the best e-mail clients there is, on or offline. Google Voice's call clarity tends to be better than Skype's, Google Reader has a clean interface to organise my RSS feeds from any web-connected device, and has a layer of social-integration for those rare moments that I want to share something with friends or see what they're recommending.

Google products tend to have a sense of humour - on the occasions that Google's services have thrown up error messages, they tend to be quirky ones, like when Google Wave (RIP) went belly-up on me one time:

A goofy error message that tells me how to fix the problem? A nice way to assuage the inconvenience of having to refresh the page, eh?

Also, when sending my girlfriend bloated text messages, most composing applications will tell me when I'm spilling over into more than one SMS, but Google Voice does it differently - have a look at the remaining-character count as I continue to prattle:

Keep prattling on and it throws its arms up at you in protest - a sensible deterrent to rambling text messages

There are new features rolled out all the freaking time. Part of the glory of having the applications on the web is that the updating process isn't very jarring - every now and again I'll log onto Google Docs to see that some new feature has been added:

Priority Inbox on Gmail, Mobile-View on Blogger, Google Instant search - they are constantly tinkering and improving on the bread-and-butter of the basic online experience, and I like to see the progress.

These seamless-updates aren't just for web-apps either, Google Chrome, my web browser of choice, updates itself in the background - if I leave Chrome running for five days solid, I'll get a prompt to restart the browser if there are updates ready to go - this is how I wish it was for 90% of the software I use.

Attention to detail: This is great software, and it shows when you consider the effort that goes into localisation. Look at the difference between the 'Options' page on Windows XP running Chrome in US English, and my Mac running Chrome in British English:

Firstly, they adhere to the Mac parlance of referring to 'options' as 'preferences', but 'Under the Bonnet'/Hood?' C'mon! That's a loving touch right there. It warms the cockles of my hearts every time I see it.

~~~

There's much I haven't touched on here for the sake of keeping this at a reasonable length - I could fill another blog entry about Android and cloud-syncing stuff, but I'll cut off the gushing for now.

I surely seem like a die-hard fan here, but the most significant contribution that Google makes is competition. They have all the money in the world to pursue projects with big budgets, which is great news for those (like me) who shop around. Google Voice has successfully supplanted Skype as my go-to VOIP solution, and how could they fail? In addition to a competitive feature set (that includes Gmail integration, a US phone number, voice-mail transcription, free texts to US numbers), they also offerred free voicecalls to the US for the entirety of 2011. That, friends, is a no-brainer.

Gmail's killer feature when it launched was 1GB of storage - at the time (if I recall correctly) Yahoo! Mail was giving me 250MB (Hotmail was bragging about 100MB not long before) - look at the major providers now - space is rarely an issue, and it's from Google pushing along the competition.

I like talking to people who dislike Google for good reasons - and there are plenty of valid reasons for not liking the company, but the products they put out are top-notch, and even if you don't partake yourself, you can surely admit to benefitting from Google's participation in the service-provider arms race, whether you use e-mail, a mobile phone, or even a TV.

If that hasn't convinced you somewhat, just remember - if you don't love Google, the hipsters win.

Google Latitude - Reports from beyond the velvet rope

Back in May, I treated myself to the HTC Desire, which runs on Google's Android operating system. One of the benefits of this operating system is that it acts as an intravenous delivery system for Google's rather nifty mobile applications. The Gmail client is solid, the Google Maps with turn-by-turn directions has saved me countless hours wandering around badly laid out Irish cities, and Google Translate allows me to swear at my phone and have it translated into a foreign language, instantly rescuing me from boring conversations at parties!

Google Latitude is a rather unusual service from the search giants that makes known your (phone's) current location to anyone you've granted access. Pretty simple idea, but Google have built some cool features on top of this simple idea.

Since I have an Android phone, and most of my friends don't, I feel like (for the first time) the cool guy who has been to the exclusive club, so I want to share with you plebs what kind of exotic delights you're missing out on.

Exotic delights like a handy pie-chart representation of how you spend your time:

(See the gap between July and August? That was my blogging hiatus)

Ever wondered "What's the furthest I've been from home?"

5,145 miles for me! (Since May 2010, anyhow)

Can't remember all those countries you've been to? Now you don't have to!

This barren map makes me want to spend obscene amounts of money to add a bit of colour

What are the places I visit most often? (Do I spend more time at my mother's or father's house?)

No wonder I spend more time at my mother's - look at the extra amenities!

Latitude can also be used to trigger proximity alerts. These SMS or E-mail alerts can trigger when you or your friend "are at an unusual place, filtering out routine alert cases at home or work", or "are at a routine place but at an unusual time". Neat! Hopefully things like this increase the amount of "chance encounters" with the kind of friends I'd hope to run into.

Bored? Why not watch a sped up version of the last 500 locations you've visited? Just click on the 'play' arrow in the top right corner of the map and watch your life being pissed away by going to work, driving around, going home, and sleeping over and over and over again!

The service as a whole is cool, but it's not quite perfect. I was immediately offended when it suggested that I spend a mere 22 hours a week at work on average, but I realised that Latitude thinks I'm half a mile away from my current position when I disable the GPS on my phone to save battery. It's no wonder that the 'out' slice of my pie-chart is so meaty. Also, saving the last 500 locations in the history might sound like plenty, but in practice it only goes back a few days - if your phone pings your location every few minutes for a couple of hours, each ping is logged as a separate location. If each recorded 'location' represented a different set of coordinates, the history feature would be much more useful.

Well, what about the privacy implications? I had only planned on leaving Latitude switched on long enough to populate the dashboard with some information, but now I'm starting to enjoy it. The amount of consideration that Google has put into privacy seems almost excessive, even in light of the Google Buzz fiasco. By default, e-mails are sent out monthly with the subject line: "Reminder - You are sharing your location with Latitude applications", which is a good thing too, because I had almost forgotten about it after I first activated it.

If you want to throw caution to the wind and share your location with everyone, you can create a location badge, which you can put on your blog for your fourteen yearly visitors not to give a shit about. Google is wise enough to offer a pared-down functionality, in which only city-level data is shared.

So far, I only have one one friend set up on Latitude, and it's been novel checking the widget on my phone and seeing how far away he is from my current position. I take it he enjoys the novelty too. Mere moments after I touched down in Shannon after a fortnight in the States, I got a text message from him that read "Welcome home!" Creepy.

Commenter Beware

Called it!

"Despicable Coward"

I was just reading a news article about a despicable coward who entered a church during a service, shot and killed the pastor (a father of two young daughters), then attempted seppuku before being tackled to the ground by two members of the congregation.


Perplexed as I may be by the hollow rhetoric the church has offered to make sense of this grotesque act ["God did it, so let's not bother our puny human brains second-guessing his motives"], and saddened as I am by this 'Meet the pastor' [Update 10/03/09: The page has been taken down] page on the church website, what I want to draw your attention to in the light of this tragedy is the infinite tact exhibited by Google Adsense underneath the news article: