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Post details: What are Skypecasts good for?

09/18/2006

What are Skypecasts good for?

I became a skype addict. When I first installed skype years ago, I did not know to whom to talk because I had no contacts at all. After all, I used skype quite often during the last weeks because skype offered a new service: "Skypecasts preview".

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A skypecast is a conference over skype with up to 100 people. This is amazing if you know, that you just could speak with up to 5 people with the "normal" skype software. So I investigated a little bit into this new free offer from skype.

It turned out that many people did their first tests with skypecasts. One guy teaches singing over skypecast, another give English lessons. But most of the people were just testing the new technology, and it was really a "preview" as it said in the headline of the website.

The first versions of the service were buggy and skype did some improvements. Meanwhile, skype is offering a new skype software (Version 2.6 which is still in beta) that includes the skypecasts in a special tab of the skype software. This software is still buggy but it looks quite promising.

If you want to play it safe, you can stick with Version 2.5 and join a skypecast from the website. In most of the times it works, sometimes the skype servers seems to be overloaded and the participant count is also not always correct.

So what?

The interesting question is now: What can I use skypecasts for? Let's assume that skype will get this thing to work bug free, and I have no doubt that they will, what would you like to do with that?

Sure, you can set up your own skypecast and title it "come and chat with me", or "I need hot girls to chat with me". But what else can be done with a skypecast?

I think, having a conference with 100 people is a nice start, but it's quite useless without having any visual clues. If you want to go beyond trivial chit-chat, you may need something to watch. People are used to PowerPoint slides if they come to a meeting. So why not including such a feature in skypecasts?

On the other hand, many people don't understand everybody in a voice chat. In most cases, people from all places of the world are speaking. Most of them have a specific accent, depending on their own culture and many people don't understand spoken English perfectly. So you also may need some kind of text chat along with your conference, to print out some words or show some links that you mention in your conversation.

At the moment, most of the skypecast users are setting up a separate text chat in skype to send text information to all the participants of the skypecast. This can be a hard work if you have more than a few people in your conference. Another point may be, that people will leave the skypecast but forget to leave the text chat also. So they will continue to get all text messages even if they are offline, and they will find them in skype when they log in the next day.

This is one reason, why some people set up their own chat on a separate website. I am working on a website that enables a text chat along with the participant list of the skypecast and that can also show web pages or screenshots to the participants. Other people, like EFL-Bridges use a separate Java Chat on their own website. Other free web 2.0 tools like http://www.thumbstacks.com can also be used to show a visual presentation along with a skypecast.

Great tool but still a lot to do!

So, I would think - and this is just my opinion - skypecasts will be a great tool in the future. As soon as you can do a voice conference with up to 100 people with text chat and visual presentation, it will be great for all kind of discussion and teaching.

I really would like to see skypecasts grow to such a powerful tool. I would also like to have it free of charge in the future, but I can imagine that some features may be valuable enough for professional users to pay a fee for these features.

For example, a private meeting within the company would be a nice feature to have for paying users.

09/18/2006 21:14:48, von Marian

, 738 words, 1616 views

Categories: Articles

2 comments

Comments, Pingbacks:

Comment from: Eagle_Kiwi (New Zealand) [Visitor] · http://contact.eaglekiwi.com

A very well put introduction to Skypecasts, Marian. Thank you. :-)
(And it was a pleasure to meet you online tonight).
Ian ~ New_Zealand.

09/19/2006 @ 12:35

Comment from: Carole [Visitor] · http://www.carolecottonconsulting.com

I am a eCareer Coach and an eFacilitator. As a non-techie who loves new "tools" I appreciate your factual analysis of skycasts. Rather than jump in and find skycasting doesn't perform as I need, I will follow your articles looking for further updates on its performance and benefits of skycasting for my clients and students.

09/24/2006 @ 16:48