Facebook Movie Talk: So What, Big Deal, Dan Costa
Facebook Movie Talk: So What, Big Deal
Facebook added a fresh way of socializing yesterday, or rather incorporated an old way. Now in addition to poking, messaging, posting, tagging, linking, questioning and otherwise exposing yourself to your friends—and your friends to your friends—you can movie talk. Mark Zuckerberg thinks this is "awesome." I think it is just another feature. Or worse, a feature few people will truly use.
Before I get all cranky, let me say it looks like Facebook’s implementation is pretty elegant. It will roll out over the next few weeks, but once you get it and install a petite applet, you are good to go. (Find out How to Get Facebook Movie Talk here.) If you attempt to call someone that doesn’t have the software, they will be prompted to download it and you will be face to face in minutes. We had some problems with our connection yesterday, but it was launch day so those can be forgiven. It seems to work indeed well. And yet, I don’t see a game changer here.
My very first point: we have been able to do this for fairly some time. Movie talk is built into AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, and innumerable other talk apps for years. And don’t leave behind Skype, the foundation upon which Facebook Movie Talk is built. Facebook Movie Talk doesn’t require you to download the total Skype client, but the functionality certainly existed before. Anyone who truly wished to movie talk on their PC certainly could have done so already.
2nd, the feature doesn’t work on mobile devices, which many people think are a major potential application of movie talk. Fring, Qik, and FaceTime are all playing in this space, but I never see anyone actually using it. Have you? And before you response, reminisce that commercials and paid-placements in gigs of 24 don’t count.
While I am on AIM all day every day, the last time I made a private movie call was when I was in Taipei last year, and that was mostly for the novelty of it. I fear doing TV appearances via Skype because I inevitably look underlit and jerky. And who wants to look like a dim jack? We have the capability to movie talk right now and very few of us do so regularly. There are, of course, exceptions.
The way I see it there are two audiences for movie talk. One is family members that want to see their kids. This could do pretty well on Facebook, in one click you can going from looking at the family album to actually watching your grandkids. Albeit I would suggest most of these calls are presently made on Skype anyway, so the shift isn’t transformative.
The other audience is the Chatroullette crowd. I apologize if this shocks you, gentle reader, but people have been sharing naked pictures long before Congressman Anthony Weiner bought his very first BlackBerry Curve. (Or was that a Bold?) Indeed compared to the sewer rivulets of pornography that flood out onto the Net each day, a one-on-one movie talk inbetween two consenting adults seems positively quaint. Albeit even here, I think the appeal is limited. Who wants to exchange sexy movies when your mom’s thumbnail is in the same Window. Not me.
So there you have it. People with kids and perverts. Just reminisce to keep those calls straight.
Perhaps the real reason I am so down on movie talk is that it’s real-time, a type of communication that is quickly becoming obsolete in our culture today. Zuckerberg nodded to this when it described the service as not being "modal" in his talk today. He said the movie talk would ring you, but you wouldn’t have to reaction it or stop what you are doing just because someone began a call. (Adding "Certainly your movie camera is not turning on until you accept [a call]." Thanks!) If you are on Facebook, you will very likely be writing, updating, linking, or otherwise multitasking. Accept the Movie Call and you can only do one thing: stare at the screen and talk.
This simply isn’t how most people want to communicate anymore. We don’t want to observe live TV, we want to time-shift it and take out the commercials. We don’t want to talk on the phone, we want a text message—not only abbreviated, but time-shifted as well. Real-time, one-on-one movie communication isn’t fresh, it is dated.
There is no reason Facebook shouldn’t include it, the service does just about everything else. But I wouldn’t call it "awesome."
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