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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Distant Friends

First, I'd like to wish all of you reading this a very happy Christmas in addition to whatever other festival you may be celebrating.

I hope one or two folk will be free to iChat later today. Like Tim Bray, John Perry Barlow and others I've discovered the delights of casual and relaxed conversations with friends all over the world using iChat AV. Australia, California, Germany and more have been extensions to my room. When I travel I try to find a hotel with in-room ethernet so I can just leave the connection to home live while I read or work, and it's not unknown to chat with good friends in California that way too, just living life in each other's company for a bit.

I'd been familiar with this before, of course - back in the early 90s I worked on an IBM product called Person to Person which included video conferencing (as well as desktop collaboration, and was lucky enough to have ISDN and a conferencing unit at home. It was clear then that if enough people had the technology, the net effect would kick in and a culture-changing 'massively connected' phenomenon would take place.

Is this it? Well, I'm not sure. Apple have shunned any support for the telephony-era protocols used by existing conferencing apps. That has the good side of ensuring all user experiences are good ones (I have yet to demo iChat AV and not draw gasps of surprise at the quality) but the bad side of limiting the scope of the net effect and leaving room for a nimble competitor to fill the gap. If they are smart they will soon introduce a Windows client and rescue us from the fate of having the sort of low-cost half-baked solutions that appear to compete with the iPod.

posted at 1:08 PM (UK) | |