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Comment by ary | Hacker News Reader

Stay classy Skype.

I wish there was an alternative that matched Skype's previous good qualities (or better). The obfuscation of the OS X Skype client UI, plus the fact that they're now owned by Microsoft has cast a shadow on what used to be a great service (to me at least). Surely there is room in the market for a serious competitor.

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Do any of these strike your fancy?

* http://www.oovoo.com/home.aspx

* http://tinychat.com/

* http://www.vbuzzer.com/conferencing/web_conferencing.php

* http://www.goober.com/

* http://www.voxox.com/

Maybe. Do you (or anyone else) have a preference?

For webcaming, I've personally found ooVoo to have better quality than Skype.

I tried ooVoo recently as my significant other had problems getting Skype working. I must say I can't see it as a competitor to Skype. The UI is borderline unusable due to all the flashing ads. What's worse is my contact list of one got deleted, and it was impossible to re-add my GF. That was on day 2. A few days later, she was back on my contact list. I don't trust it, and it's a pain to use due to all the ads and the general UI.

Tinychat is the only one of these that doesn't sound like baby talk. Skype has done well and become a verb ("Skype me") and I don't see anyone asking to voxox, oovoo, or goober me anytime soon. There is a big gap out there for someone to offer a good quality, serious competitor.

Goober is the only one with a Linux client. I may have to try that one out.

There's also LinPhone:

http://www.linphone.org

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Linphone

It has clients for: Linux, OS X, Android, and iPhone.

OPEN STANDARDS are the alternative.

XMPP and its sister protocol Jingle are all described in detail in either RFC or XEP documentation.

Are there any implementations of it that actually work well through NAT and which have a UI that non-technical people can use? We use Skype a lot - iChat would be fine, too, but seems to require port forwarding on both ends, which isn't going to happen anytime soon. Facetime forces you to use video, which isn't always what you want.

Gmail's voice and video chat works fine and has a pretty simple UI. I'm not sure it follows those specs completely but there are open-source clients that can connect to it. The Google client itself has pretty good Windows/OSX/Linux support as a browser plugin and with the Google Voice integration in Gmail you get a pretty full-featured UI to call both people that are on Google Talk and normal phones. Unfortunately the Google Voice stuff is still US only.

Gmail's voice and video chat now supports the main Jingle standards, XEP-166 and XEP-167.

And there are two open source implementations that it works with:

http://code.google.com/p/libjingle http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/

I did mention there were open-source implementations that could interface with it. I tested it against empathy (telepathy based) today and was pleasantly surprised with how well it worked. Previous attempts weren't as successful. I tried with both clients inside the same NAT though so I don't know if the firewall punching bits are as good.

Thanks for the clarification on the standards, it seems to have evolved since the early days.

Google has just added WebRTC to the Chrome source tree. WebRTC (real-time communication) consists of Jingle, VP8, some voice codecs and other audio software they bought, and various NAT traversal algorithms. The IETF is standardising it and Mozilla and Opera are committed to shipping it. Somewhat interestingly, a bunch of Skype engineers seem to have been involved in it too.

http://sites.google.com/site/webrtc/blog/firststeptowardchro...

http://tools.ietf.org/wg/rtcweb/charters

I don't know how usable it is right now, though Google is apparently rewriting their Google Talk stuff to use it. But it seems like the future.

The jingle portion of WebRTC comes form libjingle, and is usable right now with Google Talk. There is also a second open source implementation that works with Google Talk called "telepathy".

http://code.google.com/p/libjingle http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/

I use Gmail's video chat.

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