I gave in today and installed ooVoo on my Mac. I’d resisted because I’m a wee bit swamped right now, but with friends talking about “My ooVoo Day” starting on Monday I finally succumbed and installed it. I admit to being a skeptic… but I’m also open to being surprised. My skepticism is mainly because I already have a zillion ways for people to contact me and I already run several IM/voice/video clients… so it’s really NOT clear to me that I need another one. Still, the interface looks interesting and they’ve incorporated many of the features you would see in Skype and other clients… presence, status messages, etc. Many of the features are intriguing, such as the ability to do video conferencing with up to six people.
So as the admitted chaser of bright shiny objects that I am, and since they do have a Mac version – and my Mac has a webcam, I’ve installed it. Of course, given that sites like this don’t yet support what DataPortability.org is aiming to do, I have no contacts, so it’s rather useless to me right now. Yes, I can use the “Find Friends” feature to import contacts from email programs… but… maybe it’s just that I’m a “security guy”, but I’m still leery of letting programs I don’t really know have access to my email directory.
So if you are a reader of this blog and an ooVoo user (or install it now), feel free to add me as a contact. I’m using the incredibly creative username of “danyork”.
Then we can see what this ooVoo thing is all about. 🙂
P.S. Kudos to CRAYON for their blogger outreach program and their “My ooVoo Day” initiative… well done!
Technorati Tags:
oovoo, video, collaboration
HI Dan – Thanks for the post and the kudos. I’m gregverdino (also quite creative!) on ooVoo (and just about everywhere else for that matter.) I’ll add you and would be happy to put ooVoo through it’ paces with you.
I work on behalf of ooVoo blogger outreach. kwolph–I have been looking for friends too!
Our engineers tried ooVoo and are a little bit disappointed by the video quality. Will try it and write my feedbacks soon.
Dan, great chatting with you on the *other* service yesterday. Please add me as a contact in ooVoo when you have a chance – I’d love to connect with you there as well.
Made a dozen calls with it yesterday. All of them required DTMF tones, and that worked flawlessly – which isn’t always the case with Skype. But audio quality was spotty. In one case, the other party told me that they were hearing half-second drop-outs every ten seconds or so. Haven’t tried video calling yet.
The VTC is pretty awesome, and virtually the only selling point because 6 talking heads in one spot all collaborating is awesome. Everything else is pretty much available elsewhere on sites you may have heard of, YouTube/Google for example.
Hi Dan. Great post. I agree that the lack of contacts on all these proprietary video chat and video conferencing services is problematic. One of the things we are doing at Vidtel is building gateway bridges between the various video networks. Our vision is to create interoperability between any video-enabled device (computers, video watches, mobile phones, video phones) and any network (video chat, video networks, video conferencing) for the reason you pointed out: the walled gardens and lack of directory information make the proprietary systems less useful. We’re a start-up so we’re taking it one step at a time!
Hello. I found this article because I started looking into Skype, which I just signed up for (yes, I am a bit behind the times) and I was stunned to read that Skype does not support IPv6. Why did Microsoft pay $8 billion for Skype again? So while it may be a while before Skype is completely useless, I looked at alternative and found ooVoo. Then I wondered if ooVoo supports IPv6. It should be, but is it? Searching for articles on the subject lead me to this article here. If you or any of your readers no for sure that ooVoo support IPv6, I would appreciate it. Thanks.