Entries tagged with “instant messaging” from O'Reilly Digital Media Blog

With a little help from their friends at SightSpeed, Dell have launched their own video chat service, aptly named: "Dell Video Chat." It's a nice touch that a Macintosh client for this service is available. But is there a compelling reason to use it?

A while ago, I wrote a post where I said that using Skype for interviews was a bad idea. I still stand by the premise of that piece - that Skype-to-Skype connections should not be used in most situations - but a few things have happened in the last few months to change my mind about the blanket statement "Skype is bad for recording interviews."

Talk about happy coincidences: About the time my analog desk phone died last month, Skype made computer-to-telephone calling free. (Computer-to-computer Skype calls have always been free.) Because I'd bought the old phone specifically to work with a telephone tap, I started looking into ways to record Skype-based interviews. I found an easy and inexpensive solution called Ecamm Call Recorder. My...

Simple hack using Skype as an audio interviewing and archive tool. Instead of needing phone interview recording hardware (which you might not have) you can use computer tools (which you have in abundance).

In the age of always-on broadband, I think that it is time for someone to build a service around live (or pre-recorded) television content. Think about it. Beyond financial programming, there are logical applications around music, news, sports, reality television and educational programming.

WASTE is a tool for chat and IRC, with no more or less suport for filesharing than AIM. This is the most likely reason that AOL came down hard on the project.

I was happy to find this... useful for educating people who don't know all these terms.

Microsoft has announced that .NET will allow third party identity providers to compete with Passport. This is a surprising move -- I expected the company to wait until Passport was dominant before opening it to competition.

In the wake of Tuesday's events, P2P networks played a key role in connecting survivors with their loved ones and providing a timely and reliable source of information.

Messenger outage into seventh day

The problem with AOL going after GAIM is that alienating third-party developers is exactly the wrong thing for AOL to do.

The Register's take on the French telecom's buy into Jabber suggests that presence is more important than chat.

Over the last week or so, AOL started blocking Jabber, gaim, and Fire clients from connecting to AIM servers. At first AOL was doing IP blocking of Jabber servers, but at a certain point the strategy switched, and AOL started targeting libfaim, a library used by all these clients to communicate with AIM. The result was a classic cat-and-mouse game where AOL changes their protocol to block libfaim and open source programmers alter the library.