The Marvels of Chat These Days 


Jim explores the new synchronous chat modality with Stephen. 

In addition to transatlantic chats, Stephen and I have taken to chatting on our home network. This morning I got a taste of just how powerful this new modality of communication can be.

The original pretext for buying the iSight videocams was that I have my office on the third floor of our big old townhouse, and Stephen has his on the second floor. Frequently we find ourselves shouting back and forth. AV Chat would help us to communicate more effectively and in a more normal tone of voice.

This morning, we had the AV Chat going so that we could schedule some appointments. However, I had been out browsing on the internet at the Grand Circle Travel website, and was looking at the relatively inexpensive Guadalajara vacation.

I started to chat about this with to Stephen, but realized that he needed to see the website too. To accomplish this, I started up an AOL text message chat with him, pasted the URL from the website into the dialog box and sent it to him. He was able to click right on the URL and see the website.

Pretty amazing stuff, and yet even now some people are regularly using this capability. I notice that younger people are very much in synch with this capability. I frequently have learned about the internet from my younger friends. 

Posted: Fri - January 20, 2006 at 09:44 AM          

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