[kgroll]

I'm definitely not suggesting that Facetime is, or will be, a failure.

Thinking about it, however, reminded me of a passage from Infinite Jest about the failure of video chat.

(1) It turned out there there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn’t been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they’d been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony.

...

EDIT: Instead of that wall of text, here's a link to the rest of that passage. Sorry about that. http://stevereads.com/weblog/2010/06/07/iphone-4-facetimeinf...

[ugh]

Video chat it not the next big thing. It’s not telephony only better. It’s not instant messaging only better. It’s not telegraphy only better.

Video chat is merely a different way of communicating that might be useful in certain, even rare, cases. I actually think that Apple’s ads do a great job of capturing what those use cases might be. They are somewhat kitschy but they at least don’t suggest that video chat might be useful for, say, restaurant reservations.

Telephones are awesome. They get most any job you throw at them done with ease. Why would anyone go through all the trouble of buying expensive stuff and setting all that technology up and then paying much more just to get a grainy stuttering picture?

That was the situation until only a few years ago. If you want people to actually use video chat in those rare instances when it’s appropriate you have to make it really frictionless. Skype does a great job at that and I think Apple is also doing quite well, at least if they can increase interoperability in the future.

[commieneko]

Facetime, and video-phony in general, fits into a continuum of communication strategies. When you want to _see_ someone, you video them. When you only want to hear them, you audio them. When you don't want to hear them you text them.

Then there's the whole time-shifting thingie. What I would like now is the video equivalent of an email, voice mail, or text message. I _could_ record a video, and email it, but...

[jbrennan]

I agree, FaceMail or something would be incredibly nice, especially as I'm not always available to answer a video call, but would still like to see what's up eventually.

I guess it would be used like like YouTube, only privately. That is, often you see an event and video record it for sharing with others. FaceTime would let you share this live, and leaving a message seems a natural progression.

[astrange]

I really don't understand why people quote fiction in support of a statement about real life. This seems to happen a lot with Mad Men, for instance. How are you supposed to know the author knows what he's talking about, except that he vaguely agrees with you?

[olefoo]

One of the functions of fiction is to hold a mirror up to reality. To allow the user to imagine themselves in a novel, or impossible situation, to inform their emotional perceptions. To live through a scenario in play rather than to face it for the first time in reality.

[awakeasleep]

I think about that passage all the time when I'm enjoying myself enormously during a video chat with my lil brother or girlfriend.

I think DFW was either talking about awkward video chat technology of the era, or simply trying to make a prediction.