Tag: hangouts

I miss Google Talk

From the time it launched in 2005 until 2012 or so when it was folded into Hangouts, I pretty much lived my life on Google Talk. The standard operating procedure when I came home from work (back then, I used to have jobs) was to open up my computer, open Google Talk and then ping 5-6 people who were online then.

The beauty of Google Talk was that you know who exactly was online at what point in time. So when you sprayed around your “hey how are you”s, you could target them at people who you knew were (or at least appeared to be) available to chat. This meant this had a high hit rate, and you could have productive conversations.

The problem with other chat mechanisms such as WhatsApp is that there is no “online” and “offline” mode. For example, if i’m working and I’m getting stuck and could use a quick conversation, turning my status to “available” on a chat room can then be a magnet for people to ping me. Or I can see which of my friends is online using their statuses, and then ping them.

With WhatsApp, I need to guess who might be available for conversation at this point in time. And that means lots of messages sent out which get responded to at the most inopportune of times (when I’ve got back my flow of work thought, for example).

In yesterday’s business standard I read about this app (whose name I now forget about ) which is trying to restart this kind of chats, signalling “availability” and chat rooms. Hopefully something like that will take off!

FaceTime Baby

My nephew Samvit, born in 2011, doesn’t talk much on the phone. It’s possibly because he didn’t talk much on the phone as a baby, but I’ve never been able to have a decent phone conversation with him (we get along really well when we meet, though). He talks a couple of lines and hands over the phone to his mother and runs off. If it’s a video call, he appears, says hi and disappears.

Berry (born in 2016), on the other hand, seems to have in a way “leapfrogged” the phone. We moved to London when she was five and a half months old, and since then we’ve kept in touch with my in-laws and other relatives primarily through video chat (FaceTime etc.). And so Berry has gotten used to seeing all these people on video, and has become extremely comfortable with the medium.

For example, when we were returning from our last Bangalore trip in December, we were worried that Berry would miss her grandparents tremendously. As it turned out, we landed in London and video called my in-laws, and Berry was babbling away as if there was no change in scene!

Berry has gotten so used to video calling that she doesn’t seem to get the “normal” voice call. Sure enough, she loves picking up the phone and holding it against her ear and saying “hello” and making pretend conversations (apparently she learnt this at her day care). But give her a phone and ask her to talk, and she goes quiet unless there’s another person appearing on screen.

Like there’s this one aunt of mine who is so tech-phobic that she doesn’t use video calls. And every time I call her she wants to hear Berry speak, except that Berry won’t speak because there is nobody on the screen! I’m now trying to figure out how to get this aunt to get comfortable with video calling just so that Berry can talk to her!

 

In that sense, Berry is a “video call” native. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that she’ll find it really hard to get comfortable with audio calls later on in life.

I’ll turn into one uncle now and say “kids nowadays… “