Get a Haircut – Movie Talk Becomes Social Networking – s Fresh Battleground, WIRED
Get a Haircut — Movie Talk Becomes Social Networking’s Fresh Battleground
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Get a Haircut — Movie Talk Becomes Social Networking's Fresh Battleground
Movie calls aren't fresh. They debuted in the one thousand nine hundred thirty nine World Fair, and were the vision of the future in the 1960s animated cartoon The Jetsons, but the world never fairly took to the technology.
But over the last decade, Skype and other instant-message companies' free movie talk services have calmly turned us onto to the technology. And on Wednesday, Facebook announced that its legion of members can now all movie call each other with a few ordinary clicks, perhaps marking the official turning point for a seventy two year-old technology.
In fact, movie calling is turning out to be the battleground du jour inbetween Google and Facebook, as the two tech giants are angling to become the place where you identify yourself online and connect with friends, business playmates and acquaintances.
On Wednesday, Facebook announced that it had partnered with Skype to let Facebook users call one another from their camera-enabled computers, simply by clicking on a button on a friend's Facebook profile or from the talk window. After a one-time download of Skype's technology, the movie calls look to be painless and plain for anyone to use.
And Facebook has a lot of anyones — seven hundred fifty million of them.
As technology goes, the fresh feature violates little ground. Free movie calls via IM services such as Yahoo, AIM and GTalk have been around for years. Skype, the world's largest telecom company — as measured by minutes of phone calls — has long suggested free one-to-one movie calling.
So the news from Facebook is in the plainness of the technology and that Facebook is instantly putting the tech into the mitts of hundreds of millions of mitts, with the promise if you can Farmville, you can video-call your high school sweetheart.
That's key because hundreds of millions of users have built giant webs of connections inwards Facebook, and now you can simply call them by clicking once inwards Facebook.
No need to ask what their Skype or AIM treat is. No one even needs a Skype account to use the feature. So long as the talk feature is decently usable, it's hard to see how it won't be a intensely used feature that keeps Facebookers coming back. (And given it's based on Skype's decentralized and proven peer-to-peer technology, it's unlikely that it won't hold up under even an extreme crush of impatient users).
Compare that to Hangout, Google's fresh movie talk in its still invite-only social network Google+.
Hangout is designed as a group talk application for impromptu socializing with friends. To commence one, you press a button proclaiming you are open to stringing up out, choose which circle(s) of friends to send the invite to, and up to ten people can be in the room at any one time. The loudest talker gets the big space up top — and the group can collectively talk or even see YouTube movies together. As youthfull Marty McFly once said in a different context, your kids are going to love it.
The Fresh York Times' Jenna Wortham said the chatroom “switched her life,” and that she and her friends are finding themselves addicted and up all night in the talk room.
And from a technical standpoint, it's a miracle compared to Facebook's Skype integration.
From a social perspective, it's also very different.
You can, if you like, simply talk with one person, by inviting only that person to huddle. But unlike with Facebook, the invite doesn't instantaneously pop up on their screen as a notification — instead it shows up in their inbox or their stream of updates on their profile page.
For the coming weeks, it'll be a very intriguing test of what it is that people want most from their social networks — serendipitous online partying or intimate one-on-one conversations with family and friends. (To be fair, Google+ also has Google Talk's movie talk in the sidebar, but it's not deeply integrated into the service and feels like a ordinary cut-and-paste from Gmail's interface.)
But don't expect the differences — and limitations — to last too long. Skype has the capability to do group talks, and has cheap outbound calling to the traditional phone network. Meantime Google has a panoply of other communication technologies, including one-to-one movie talk — Google Talk — and free phone calls within the United States and cheap international calls that are presently bundled into Gmail. Expect both competitors to race to integrate all of these into their offerings.
As for mobile movie calling, the outlier Apple has the lead, for now, with its FaceTime software that lets iPhone4, iPad two and Mac users make movie calls to one another. Skype recently bought Qik, the Android leader in mobile movie talk, but the service hasn't been hugely adopted by Android and iPhone users.
Facebook's Skype integration, likewise, doesn't work on mobile devices or tablets yet. Google is a bit closer as Talk's movie service works from mobile phones and tablets running Gingerbread, the latest version of Android, but that's a puny percentage of the Android phones in the market. And at least for now, Hangout is a desktop- and laptop-only feature.
Google and Apple's best bet for mobile dominance likely resides in opening up their movie calling protocols so that independent app makers can build interoperable movie calling apps for a broad range of mobile devices and other platforms.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs promised to make FaceTime an open standard, and Google is likely to attempt to match that with their fresh technology underlying Hangout.
However, Skype is unlikely to do so: All signs from the past say no. And once it's possessed by Microsoft and paired with Facebook, it will have even less need to do so, since it will have effortless access to hundreds of millions of users. Already Skype says it treats three hundred million minutes of movie calling a month, and at peak times, up to half of its call volume is now movie.
While we're unlikely to end up in a world where you can call anyone on any service from any other service, one thing's for sure. The world's thickest tech companies are now wooed that the future will look something like <em>The Jetsons</em>, even if few of us expect to the future's workweek to limited to three hours a day, three days a week.
But at least, we'll be able to movie call our spouses and family to explain why it is we are still working so much.
Photo: A movie call from the past – sort of. (Ian Broyles/Flickr)