[tags]Matthew Ebel, piano rock, ooVoo, Frozen Pea Fund, Join The Conversation[/tags]

Since these kind of reviews are best written in bullet points, I’ll open up my box of ammo and oblige.

• Good: oovoo, as advertised, does indeed facilitate 6-way video conferencing.
• Good: oovoo seems to be Johnny-on-the-spot with updates when they know something’s screwed. The first oovoo chat couldn’t even support 1-to-1 conversation, let alone 6. And I was on a fiber-optic connection with 5Mbit download. The very next day a new client version appeared and, apparently, solved most of the connectivity issues.
• Bad: The client sucks. I mean sucks like Battlefield Earth. First of all, it appears to be written in Java, which means it may as well be running on an old PowerPC in Windows using VirtualPC (read: NOT ideal for high-performance video/audio streaming). The client takes forever to load, the interface is totally un-Mac-like and doesn’t respond to the usual interface cues, like two-finger trackpad scrolling. When it does work, the audio and video are terribly out of sync, even for 1-to-1 conversations. I know the Mac version is still in Beta phase, but that means…
• Worse: The Mac version is still in Beta phase. Folks, this isn’t 1993 anymore. When you release a video-chat client and treat a huge swath of people with cameras built into their hardware like they’re an afterthought, you’re not making any friends. In fact, you send a clear message to guys like me that you’re never going to support Macs the way you support Windows, and here’s where this is a marketing blunder:
  1. You’re eventually going to want to monetize this thing. Selling special services, perhaps? Like Skype does? Why the heck would a Mac user spend money on a company when they’re not sure they’re ever going to get real support?
  2. When you have the audacity to actually release feature-comparable full versions simultaneously to PC’s and Macs, Mac people notice. When Mac people find a new service or company whose support is 100% equal, they latch onto it and tell the world.
  3. This may just be my perception, but the move seems to me to be tacit admission that oovoo knows it has nothing to offer that iChat doesn’t already excel at, other than bringing Windows users to the party.
• Bad: One more little annoyance about the ported Mac test version… Windows sufferers may be used to their software assuming you want it to load right at startup… but when I logged in and had to wait for a Java app to load up that I didn’t ask for, I got pretty pissed off at oovoo right there.
• Bad: Finally, the dumbest PR move I’ve seen yet just happened tonight. I got this email (click the image to see the full version). They’re announcing new features! Yay! Oh, wait, They’re Windows-only features. I’m assuming oovoo was just too shortsighted to keep their email lists separated into Mac and PC users, but it’s tantamount to thumbing one’s nose at Mac users and saying “look what you CAN’T do.”

So my prediction is simple: Mac users will never see the same kind of support that PC users will. oovoo, like ICQ and Yahoo!, will eventually get most features ported over, but it’ll be three versions behind. That kind of hand-me-down technology just isn’t worth my time.

Especially since oovoo has yet to offer anything that Skype and iChat don’t already cover. They don’t require loading up a slow, awkward virtual machine, either. Sorry, oovoo, you’re about to give me back my hard drive space.

Update: I forgot to mention… Very, Very Good: The whole My oovoo Day promotion has raised a whole bunch of money for The Frozen Pea Fund, which is a hell of a good way to start. This kind of outreach is why I joined a few oovoo conversations in the first place.

Full Disclosure: Yeah, oovoo is one of crayon‘s clients, and crayon is one of my clients. To be honest, I think the marketing behind My oovoo Day was brilliant. And it accomplished exactly what it was supposed to… I used it, and I talked about it. It ain’t crayon’s fault that oovoo doesn’t have a finished product yet.

[tags]Matthew Ebel, piano rock, oovoo, video, My oovoo Day, iChat, Skype, parity, shortsightedness[/tags]