Family meeting! Chocolate Factory makes its business-like video-chat service free to anyone with a Google account Google is making its Meet video-chat service free to anyone who wants it, as long as you have a Google account. Perhaps with an eye on the soaraway success of Zoom, and conscious of the fact that, let's face it, Hangouts has its limitations, Meet (formerly a paid-for service aimed at businesses) will be free, albeit with a few …
I do realise why video conferencing has been a bit of a hit during the current epidemic (even my 83-year-old mum, a technophobe to the ends of her toes) has embraced her iPad and surprisingly(!) doesn't have any technical problems when she wants to use something, but I hate them.
Years ago, I got to use something called Halo in anger (http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press_kits/2008/halo/products.html) - it was brilliant, but being HP incredibly badly marketed! It was as close to a real meeting place as I have seen (and this is >10 years ago, not that I have looked hard since). Many of the social norms (who for god's sake looks straight into the eyes of a presenter?) were maintained, and the relative expense made sure that the meetings were tight - although the benefits of not having to attend meetings in Palo Alto from the UK more than made up for it.
Now I simply refuse to use or sanction video conferences for meetings unless absolutely necessary - and then it is only because a customer wants it - running a small company across three EU sites and one non (the UK although for how much longer?), we rely on shared documents and voice with a tight agenda - and it works. meetings are short enough and productive.
My mum carries on - although I always just use voice - but then she has grown tired of my face over 53 years!
Just say no for business.
I wanted to highlight the opposite side to "just say no...."
I work for a company that's embraced Video Conferencing since video conferencing was a thing.... Firstly, it's not mandated. You can chose NOT to have video on, and if you do, it's never questioned. People very quickly discovered that "you should be careful with what you wish for" when requesting video.
Anyway... Right now I miss my colleagues. I work in a great office, with great people, and I genuinely miss them. So, being able to see who you're talking to, and seeing their micro reactions, is so incredibly powerful. In so many different ways. A text message is soulless. An email, inhuman. A phone call is social, and a video call is personal.
I don't understand this. I work in Europe, with people from different countries, different firms, and different philosophies. I do conf calls about five times a week, too. Yet, not once, not even once I encountered Zoom. It's Webex, GoToMeeting, or whatever MS decided to call their confcall solution that week.
... and therein lies the crunch: "Here! Have some free stuff! Just click the 'I agree' box on the EULA, don't worry about scrolling to the bottom! Never mind that we're foremost an advertising business, and our business model is based on grabbing as much information about you as we possibly can..."
Yeah... not on my machine, thank you.
There's a rub. Zoom have played fast and loose with their security and data harvesting to the point that reputable concerns are very wary of it. It was going to be a way to connect my wife and her colleagues with their classes for some face-to-face teaching and parent meetings during lockdown. But it's been prevented because of the poor security.
Meanwhile MS are advertising their service on TV a lot. And now this from Google.
This is a real shame because Zoom's security is nowhere near as bad as the press has made it out to be.
They've certainly had some problems in the past including a couple of fairly serious ones, but they have long-since fixed those and are on a massive drive right now to improve their security and rebuild people's confidence in the product.
Of course, the major concern for teachers is that they don't want someone hijacking a virtual classroom and displaying inappropriate content to all the kids as seems to have happened in a couple of settings... The default settings in Zoom have been tweaked to prevent this and in most cases the first problem is likely to have been the meeting hosts sharing the private meeting link on a publicly accessible web page.
It was less about 'security' and more about not having sensible 'fool-proof' defaults, although there were some security elements too... However, I have no doubt that a miscreant inadvertently admitted to any Hangout, WebEx, Teams or whatever other meeting could easily misbehave in a similar way.
What saddens me is that a relatively small company like Zoom with (in my opinion) a best in class product gets absolutely blasted for a small number of naive mistakes whilst people don't hesitate to trust the likes of Microsoft despite their appalling security track-record over the years.
My experience of Teams has been pretty poor so far and it lacks so many features from Zoom that would make it a poor choice for running a virtual class at the moment.
I used Google Hangouts for the first time the other day which worked okay (and the automatic closed captions were useful) but it felt incredibly basic and suffered one of the same limitations of Teams in that you can only see four participants at once... It'll be interesting to see what Google Meet brings to the table.
To be fair, the paid version which I've used for a couple of years now does not require participants to have a login and offers phone dial in mechanisms as well.
It's one of those actually quite well implemented products which no one really knows about.
Zero software to install unlike Microsoft Teams which repeatedly asks you if you wouldn't much prefer their app or Zoom who forces you to use an app.
It suddenly appeared in their school Gsuite dashboard and one of them immediately started using it to video-call classmates. I wonder if the school has noticed yet? Not entirely sure the school would appreciate it being used simply as a social meeting place. Not that I was eavesdropping (nor, actually in the same building for most of it) but I don't think the kids were discussing school work.
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