Well, maybe not so new, but close. Normally , I wouldn’t advertise for a service for free, but this one truly deserves it. Oovoo is an odd name for a communications service simmilar to Skype, Yahoo Messanger, or MS Live. There seems to be a lot of these services around, some more popular than others. What makes Oovoo worth gushing over is the fact that, ONE: It works; TWO: It’s free, and THREE: It allows videoconferencing with multiple people. No crap.
My fight with VoIP services and SIP hardware had me down. My phone bill was outrageous, especially for a cheapo like me. Time and money spent on VoIP (Grandstream junk and Gizmo accounts) was simply lost. On top of that, my wife’s family was preparing for a big wedding and the minutes were adding-up even faster. What the hell am I going to do now?
About 8 months ago, my wife’s niece asked her to send her a video message over Yahoo and that started it all. It led me to re-investigate these (what I still called) “Chat” services. I’ve been on the internet since 1992, but I’ve never been a chat freak. Always considered that a silly waste of time, especially with all the porn waiting to be downloaded out there. Now, with family in two other countries wanting to talk all the time, I found myself downloading a different service every week to find one that would actually do what it advertised. I was shocked to discover how poorly some of these systems worked. Insane GUI’s, poor bandwidth, software that acted like malware (yes, I’m referring to Yahoo); I was getting sick of trying to debug this shit-software problems everyday, sometimes from 2000 miles away. On top of that, everyone complained that they couldn’t talk to eachother at once. I almost thought of perusing warez sites for corporate VC software and codes. Not good.
Then, I discovered Oovoo. Oovoo allowed free Video conferencing for up to six people (now changed to only 3 for free, but still better than anyone else) and had solid software that really works. No virus-ware, no ad-ware, small rescource usage. It looks cool too. It will give you sound and video quality as good as your hardware and connection can handle. As a matter of fact, Oovoo works better than many “real” corporate videoconferencing systems I’ve seen. The paid service has many more benefits. What you don’t get is phone access (like Skype) or a real POP3 mail address (like MSN or Yahoo). But, these problems don’t effect me. I pitched the SIP phone some time ago, and I still have an actual email address. The real test: Once I convinced her entire family to download Oovoo (what a hassle that was), I stopped having to fight with my computer (or someone else’s) every day. On top of that, I get a video service I never would have had with SIP (at least for free). What I’m saving on phone bills have more than made up for the bandwidth upgrade I needed (96K was a little slow to host 3 people).
For the first time, everyone in the family is able to talk to eachother at once. Thank you, Oovoo.
