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Comment by lukifer | Hacker News Reader

Is there a reason they couldn't have just folded this feature into iChat?

It's not an enhanced chat. It is the trojan program that may make a go at replacing telephony. What happens when they add:

• 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.

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.

>Facetime is then an open system

I'm a big Apple fan but feel I would have to turn in my nerd credentials if I failed to point out that you just used the "o" word to describe an Apple product (without qualifying it) :-)

I'm guessing so they can do a Windows client with a consistent UI.

I rather have it separately because I rarely open my iChat. Adium FTW :)

Curious, what do you like so much about Adium? I find it quite the abomination in terms of user experience (ex the Preferences).

iChat is a breath of fresh air by comparison.

iChat doesn't support accounts other than AIM and MobileMe, does it? I haven't really checked the updates on iChat for awhile so it might have been updated since the last time I tried to use it. User experience wise..it doesn't bother me at all, or I can't remember the last time I got annoyed by Adium. Also, the customizable (with a lot of external themes that you can download) layout of the buddy list and the chat windows are quite amazing.

iChat supports Google Chat (natively and also all jabber, too).

How about MSN Messenger and Facebook? (Don't have my mbp with me at the moment to check)

I wish they had-

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

> It loses several major features of iChat sharing

Good news: if you're chatting with an other mac, iChat still exists, it's not been removed.

> Screensharing

Wouldn't work between an iPhone and a mac

> replaceable backgrounds

Terrible feature

> Multi-person chat...

Might yet be reintroduced.

Even if it were folded in iChat, those features would not be available there.

Reminds me of Quicktime 7 vs. Quicktime X: I end up having to use both, since X is a better player, but 7 is a better casual editor.

Which are all features that would ruin FaceTime.

Except multi-person chat. That's right up its alley but probably just isn't feasible for the mobile users, bandwidth-wise.

How so? Honestly? Why would it ruin Facetime, but not ruin iChat?

I bet there are already more non-geek users of FaceTime than iChat because it's so approachable. Adding features like those caters to the wrong audience. The beauty of FaceTime is its simplicity.

(This sounds like an Apple fanboy thing to say, but I'm really not.)

I would also say using iChat also dilutes the FaceTime brand.

In the event video, the FaceTime icon had replaced the iChat icon's traditional position on the dock.

The only thing I'd want extra is absolutely rock-solid multi-user audio/video chat. I'm talking more reliable than Skype, which is not easy to beat.

I was laying in bed and for whatever reason it just smacked me in the face. Yes, there's a reason, and I was reminded of an anecdote regarding blackberries being served in the lobby to the press.

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.

I'm thinking because it's not using AIM or any chat server, seems like the backend is new, run by Apple, and dedicated solely to this.

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.

It's based on whole new video standards. It's not compatible with the existing setup and would have been hard to integrate for a beta.

Are you speculating or do you know that for a fact?

FaceTime is based on numerous technologies:

    * H.264 and AAC – video and audio codecs respectively
    * SIP – IETF signaling protocol for VoIP
    * STUN, TURN and ICE – IETF technologies for traversing firewalls and NAT
    * RTP and SRTP – IETF standards for delivering real-time and encrypted media streams for VoIP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facetime

Sounds very similar to iChat videoconferencing, which also uses h.264, AAC, SIP, RTP and SRTP. The only difference I could find is in the way iChat traverses firewalls and NAT, which it does via SNATMAP.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1507

I wasn't contending that. I was wondering if the commenter had an knowledge that integration was difficult.

I guess I mean that FaceTime doesn't support all the iChat features and would be hard to just fit into iChat. Not to mention iChat is based around buddy lists, AIM service (or Jabber) and FaceTime uses your address book, push notification server, etc.

You can't screen share, file share, or multi-person video chat in FaceTime. It would be confusing to users if FaceTime was just tacked onto iChat as is.

It just makes more sense to have it be a standalone beta.

They could have created FaceTime to be compatible in the first place.

Maybe they don't want it to be compatible.

My understanding is that that may be the end result, but this is a beta, so it's on its own for now.

it's not REVOLUTIONARY then, is it?

Revolutionary: no. Magical: yes.

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