I'm definitely not suggesting that Facetime is, or will be, a failure.
Thinking about it, however, reminded me of a passage from Infinite Jest about the failure of video chat.
(1) It turned out there there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn’t been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they’d been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony.
Video chat it not the next big thing. It’s not telephony only better. It’s not instant messaging only better. It’s not telegraphy only better.
Video chat is merely a different way of communicating that might be useful in certain, even rare, cases. I actually think that Apple’s ads do a great job of capturing what those use cases might be. They are somewhat kitschy but they at least don’t suggest that video chat might be useful for, say, restaurant reservations.
Telephones are awesome. They get most any job you throw at them done with ease. Why would anyone go through all the trouble of buying expensive stuff and setting all that technology up and then paying much more just to get a grainy stuttering picture?
That was the situation until only a few years ago. If you want people to actually use video chat in those rare instances when it’s appropriate you have to make it really frictionless. Skype does a great job at that and I think Apple is also doing quite well, at least if they can increase interoperability in the future.
Facetime, and video-phony in general, fits into a continuum of communication strategies. When you want to _see_ someone, you video them. When you only want to hear them, you audio them. When you don't want to hear them you text them.
Then there's the whole time-shifting thingie. What I would like now is the video equivalent of an email, voice mail, or text message. I _could_ record a video, and email it, but...
I agree, FaceMail or something would be incredibly nice, especially as I'm not always available to answer a video call, but would still like to see what's up eventually.
I guess it would be used like like YouTube, only privately. That is, often you see an event and video record it for sharing with others. FaceTime would let you share this live, and leaving a message seems a natural progression.
I really don't understand why people quote fiction in support of a statement about real life. This seems to happen a lot with Mad Men, for instance. How are you supposed to know the author knows what he's talking about, except that he vaguely agrees with you?
One of the functions of fiction is to hold a mirror up to reality. To allow the user to imagine themselves in a novel, or impossible situation, to inform their emotional perceptions. To live through a scenario in play rather than to face it for the first time in reality.
We just downloaded it and tried it (bringing my total Facetime experiences to two, both of which occurred about 10 feet from the person on the other end). The interface is more iOS-y than normal for OS X. The picture quality was pretty good (the Mac being wired, iPhone 4 being wireless of course).
It's not an enhanced chat. It is the trojan program that may make a go at replacing telephony. What happens when they add:
• audio only facetime.
• the ability to audio only facetime with people on telephones.
Facetime is then an open system for contacting people on a wide variety of devices with graceful fallback to even simple telephones. It becomes 1st choice and total minutes used of voice telephony dwindles.
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Or not. Apple is comfortable putting a product in place and waiting to see if it is a goer or not. Apple TV has been sitting around for years waiting for favorable licensing. It might be getting close, or maybe not.
I'm a big Apple fan but feel I would have to turn in my nerd credentials if I failed to point out that you just used the "o" word to describe an Apple product (without qualifying it) :-)
iChat doesn't support accounts other than AIM and MobileMe, does it? I haven't really checked the updates on iChat for awhile so it might have been updated since the last time I tried to use it. User experience wise..it doesn't bother me at all, or I can't remember the last time I got annoyed by Adium. Also, the customizable (with a lot of external themes that you can download) layout of the buddy list and the chat windows are quite amazing.
I bet there are already more non-geek users of FaceTime than iChat because it's so approachable. Adding features like those caters to the wrong audience. The beauty of FaceTime is its simplicity.
(This sounds like an Apple fanboy thing to say, but I'm really not.)
I was laying in bed and for whatever reason it just smacked me in the face. Yes, there's a reason, and I was reminded of an anecdote regarding blackberries being served in the lobby to the press.
iChat is a presence and messaging framework that's completely ad hoc. The server frameworks don't do anything but presence and messaging.
Not so with Facetime. Apple just aimed a loaded gun at RIM, Avaya, and Ericsson today, and Facetime is the proof of concept. Verizon on the iPad was cocking the hammer. Apple has just shown the world that it has full enterprise communication stack integration from LDAP to device and more importantly the network in-between... and that network in between has a lot of control. Apple needs these guys a lot.
Submitting the protocol stack to the IETF is a win with consumers, but I'm sure that RIM, Ericsson, etc., are seeing this as spit on the face and more to the point it's probably why the guy at RIM completely lost his cool last week.
Apple is going at the enterprise in a remarkable manner, and probably the only way they could have.
I'm thinking because it's not using AIM or any chat server, seems like the backend is new, run by Apple, and dedicated solely to this.
If I were to predict the future, I'd say iChat will probably stagnate feature-wise, and the features that they want to keep will be migrated to facetime.
* H.264 and AAC – video and audio codecs respectively
* SIP – IETF signaling protocol for VoIP
* STUN, TURN and ICE – IETF technologies for traversing firewalls and NAT
* RTP and SRTP – IETF standards for delivering real-time and encrypted media streams for VoIP
Sounds very similar to iChat videoconferencing, which also uses h.264, AAC, SIP, RTP and SRTP. The only difference I could find is in the way iChat traverses firewalls and NAT, which it does via SNATMAP.
I guess I mean that FaceTime doesn't support all the iChat features and would be hard to just fit into iChat. Not to mention iChat is based around buddy lists, AIM service (or Jabber) and FaceTime uses your address book, push notification server, etc.
You can't screen share, file share, or multi-person video chat in FaceTime. It would be confusing to users if FaceTime was just tacked onto iChat as is.
It just makes more sense to have it be a standalone beta.
Facetime could become a strong competitor to Skype once a Windows client is available as the UI seems very polished and well "integrated". Now only if my parents had a Mac so I can test it out. They always seem to have issues getting video chat working on Skype/Windows.
Skype is strong in businesses. In the office-setting people first and foremost use the text-chat, then the audio calls, then the conference calls. Video calls come dead last. I wouldn't be surprised if even desktop sharing is used more than the video feature.
The desktop sharing of skype has a long way to go to be used seriously. I can only assume from your comment that you haven't used it. They may have their audio codec down, and the video codec works for live video, but not for content. It's the same deal with JPEG for text for instance.
I was actually thinking today that Apple should buy Skype ... recalling the recent post about Apple buying Facebook, I think Skype would be a better fit.
called the wife from the mac to her iphone... she didn't know the difference. later she called me back on facetime to the pc and it just popped up - overall not bad!
According to the presentation, it's supposed to be made a standard. I'm assuming this would hit the IETF's Audio/Video transport working group, so that'd be where to keep a lookout.
"It's also portable to when there is a version of FaceTime for Android/etc. They had originally claimed it to be an open standard."
Android 3.0 (Gingerbread) is rumored to gain support for the same protocol used in the desktop version of Google Talk: Jingle. Jingle sounds a lot like FaceTime, I wouldn't be surprised if the two are compatible.
No word from Apple so far, but I recall them saying that they would share the code with whoever wants to implement it, which isn't quite the same as open sourcing it.
The sticky wicket isn't the protocols used to schlep the video, it's the session initiation. Apple's mapping phone numbers (for iPhones) and email addresses (for iPods and now Macs) to a central hub to initiate calls. That's how the FaceTime Mac application launches when someone initiates a call to my email address; on iOS I presume it uses push notifications.
Open-sourcing the protocol doesn't solve the integration issue, and Apple hasn't said anything publicly about letting third parties join this particular sandbox.
My guess is that it uses some newer APIs which were introduced in 10.6. This may be because they wanted to use Grand Central Dispatch (better multi-core support), a later addition to Core Graphics or simply an API which gave their GUI the more iOS feel compared to the GUI elements in 10.5.
It would be exciting if I'm proven wrong, but I'm not buying the hype about video chat.
Even if/when I'm able to video chat anyone from my iPhone without being on wifi, I still don't imagine it being terribly useful. And the few times I've tried using video chat in a business setting have not been very fruitful.
I work in a startup in SF. I've been using video chat for awhile. We go out of our way to find good quality stable video chat solutions. Everyone on our floor of startups use video chat.
People not able to video chat with us are now equal to people asking us to fax something in.
You just made me laugh out loud, which I rarely do while sitting at a computer. I honestly thought rflrob's comment made a lot of sense, until I read yours.
I have to say though: I absolutely loathe doorbells and ringing phones, they stress me out. Ideally, my doorbell would have a vibrate mode, making the floor gently purr.
Judging from this FaceTime app and the new iLife apps, it looks like there will be all sorts of new iOS-like UI goodies for Cocoa 10.7 developers to use.
Thinking about it, however, reminded me of a passage from Infinite Jest about the failure of video chat.
(1) It turned out there there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn’t been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they’d been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony.
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EDIT: Instead of that wall of text, here's a link to the rest of that passage. Sorry about that. http://stevereads.com/weblog/2010/06/07/iphone-4-facetimeinf...