Yahoo Offers New Mobile Chat Service Featuring Silent Video | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo Offers New Mobile Chat Service Featuring Silent Video

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30 pointswalterbell14 comments

To me it sounds like it combines the disadvantages of video calls (the attention required, transparency - no lying about your whereabouts, the intrusiveness - no video call at the office because you might reveal something confidential...) with the disadvantages of texting (typing is more difficult than speaking and it's a more difficult way to convey ideas and emotions).

This is a setup that works really well, amongst other things, for communication between people in long distance relationships (ie it is a form of telepresence). You get the visceral satisfaction of permanent visual feedback with the advantages of asynchronous communication.

> This is a setup that works really well, amongst other things, for communication between people in long distance relationships

Having had a job that involved distant communication I don't think I'd have used this approach. It requires high data usage for the video, so why not just add the audio stream and be done with it?

My wife and I recoded little video snippets through the day and synced them each evening. Hearing all the background noise and clatter was part of experiencing 'home' for me.

With poor internet connections, the stuttering audio gets frustrating very quickly. "What did you say?" "I missed half that sentence." "Could you repeat that?"

We end up just typing it up on the 2nd or 3rd try because the audio keeps breaking up. There's only 1 more week of this, thank goodness.

This app fills a much needed gap in the mobile messaging landscape.

This is a great idea!

Here is their official product demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-3Mw4Ilvl4

reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs

Quite a neat idea. It's a while since I've seen something from Yahoo that I would consider different or original. They also have a new Flickr app now which lets you back your phone's photos up to Flickr with 1TB free storage which is also pretty neat.

It's weird. When people are texting, most of the faces remain wooden. Nobody wants to look at a wooden face.

Students wouldn't like to use it in the classroom because video is data-consuming.

This sounds like just another sign of how Yahoo has lost their minds :)

Any deaf HNers here? Would this work well for the deaf community?

Just as well as snapchat works...

Seems like the features and misfeatures were chosen completely at random. I don't care about video, but having access to chatlogs seems really important. So this app seems like a complete miss to me.

Uhh, sorry Yahoo, Snapchat has been able to do video with text on it for a while now. Their video even has audio!

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