Saturday, September 10, 2005

IM-ing

Today I was having a conversation with my father. Normally that's not very unusual, but this time, we were having this conversation using Yahoo's new voice feature. We spent 45 minutes on the "phone" (it really is like making a phone call) and about 35 minutes of that was spent marvelling at the technology and saying, "This is neat!"

The quality was really pretty good, better in fact than it used to be because chatting through an instant messenger such as Yahoo or MSN isn't that new. It's just better. And the best thing of all? It's FREE. I am all about the free stuff, let me tell you.

I can talk with my peeps in England if I want to, for as long as I want to, all free. I'll be annoying my sister on a more frequent basis now as well as some of my good friends in Chicago, California and Florida. My aunt in Lincoln is getting into it. My father will be hooking up with his friend in Italy more often now. It's neat!

The benefits:
  • Free. I can't stress that enough.
  • Yahoo's voice technology is really clear, with little delay. I would liken it to using a mobile phone.
  • It will encourage you to talk more to your loved ones who live far away. It might even bring you closer to someone you've never even met - only ever exchanged some text messages with.
  • If the person you try to call doesn't answer Yahoo allows you to leave a voicemail they can pick up later. How freakin' cool is that?
  • Did I mention it's free?

    The drawbacks:
  • Well it's not all that portable. Unless you want to lug around your laptop and try and find Wi-fi when you need to contact someone on your contact list.
  • You will need to download Yahoo messenger, and you'll need a microphone. My laptop has a mic built-in and when I'm on my desktop, I just use the mic built-in to my webcam. If you don't have a mic, they're pretty cheap - my father picked one up at Office Max today for 15 bucks.

    Obviously the applications for this are far-reaching, from the perverse which I will leave up to your imagination, to the practical. You can conference in several people and have a meeting or you can have one-on-one chats with friends.

    Or you can be sad like me and use it to "call" your daughter sitting in the next room on the other computer and ask her to bring you a Coke :)

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