Mobility - We Need To Make Video Chat A Habit

In my quest to see the feasibility of my MacWind and the amount of productivity I can get from it, I've been trying a lot of true mobility tasks.

Now, the Wind is a netbook.  Not a regular notebook.  It is a fact that I recognize in using it but I want to see how far I can push it despite running Leopard quite handily for day-to-day tasks.

So we've been trying some video conferencing on our netbooks.  As you may well know there are choices for video chats.

• IM services - AOL, Yahoo, and MSN have been around for a long time in offering services.
• Gtalk - just this week, two days ago in fact, you can now chat with your contacts right out of the browser in Gmail.
• Skype - You do know it does more than offer chats, IM, and Skypeout to regular landlines, right?
• Others - definite a lot more but it depends on your cup of tea in this matter.  But you get my idea.  Mobility has never been easier.  
• iChat - on the Mac, it is the default IM program and the video chat is very smooth.
• Oovoo - still in beta but has tons of 

On a Mac, iChat works best for me as more and more people I know start using Macs or install OS X on Intel -based systems.  But we tried something different last night.  I'll get into it in the next post.

But you see.  IM is fun.  Voice over the Internet is more fun.  But video chat is much more funner.  Not to mention productive if applied correctly.

This is the way things will go.  Even future generations of mobile devices like the iPhone, Blackberries, or Google's Android will sport video chat capabilities.  That's a no-brainer declaration.  So, make using video chat, whatever service is employed, simply makes a lot of sense.

Already, students are using it to share information and conduct study groups.  We've said this before at Onxo and we finally have the tools and bandwidth to make it happen.

I'll get into our experience on MeBeam next but I would love to hear stories of how regular mobile warriors use video chats.