Facetime for the Mac

Then there's the whole time-shifting thingie. What I would like now is the video equivalent of an email, voice mail, or text message. I _could_ record a video, and email it, but...

I think DFW was either talking about awkward video chat technology of the era, or simply trying to make a prediction.

Video chat is merely a different way of communicating that might be useful in certain, even rare, cases. I actually think that Apple’s ads do a great job of capturing what those use cases might be. They are somewhat kitschy but they at least don’t suggest that video chat might be useful for, say, restaurant reservations.

Telephones are awesome. They get most any job you throw at them done with ease. Why would anyone go through all the trouble of buying expensive stuff and setting all that technology up and then paying much more just to get a grainy stuttering picture?

That was the situation until only a few years ago. If you want people to actually use video chat in those rare instances when it’s appropriate you have to make it really frictionless. Skype does a great job at that and I think Apple is also doing quite well, at least if they can increase interoperability in the future.

It loses several major features of iChat sharing- Screensharing, replaceable backgrounds, Multi-person chat...

If I were to predict the future, I'd say iChat will probably stagnate feature-wise, and the features that they want to keep will be migrated to facetime.

• audio only facetime.

• the ability to audio only facetime with people on telephones.

Facetime is then an open system for contacting people on a wide variety of devices with graceful fallback to even simple telephones. It becomes 1st choice and total minutes used of voice telephony dwindles.

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Or not. Apple is comfortable putting a product in place and waiting to see if it is a goer or not. Apple TV has been sitting around for years waiting for favorable licensing. It might be getting close, or maybe not.

iChat is a presence and messaging framework that's completely ad hoc. The server frameworks don't do anything but presence and messaging.

Not so with Facetime. Apple just aimed a loaded gun at RIM, Avaya, and Ericsson today, and Facetime is the proof of concept. Verizon on the iPad was cocking the hammer. Apple has just shown the world that it has full enterprise communication stack integration from LDAP to device and more importantly the network in-between... and that network in between has a lot of control. Apple needs these guys a lot.

Submitting the protocol stack to the IETF is a win with consumers, but I'm sure that RIM, Ericsson, etc., are seeing this as spit on the face and more to the point it's probably why the guy at RIM completely lost his cool last week.

Apple is going at the enterprise in a remarkable manner, and probably the only way they could have.

Skype is strong in businesses. In the office-setting people first and foremost use the text-chat, then the audio calls, then the conference calls. Video calls come dead last. I wouldn't be surprised if even desktop sharing is used more than the video feature.

People not able to video chat with us are now equal to people asking us to fax something in.

I work remotely a lot and always choose audio chat over video chat. Video chatting, in that context, just doesn't add anything for me.

Video chat was great when my girlfriend was living abroad for a couple of months though!

You can turn it off in the preferences.