Upgrades, arrgh!

I'm back after a hiatus to catch up on other areas of my life, including a 3 week visit over Christmas from our daughter who is spending a year in Norway.
This brings Skype to mind. This is a rapidly evolving company. Around Christmas they had an upgrade to version 2. It introduced video calls! I had expected loss of quality and was happy that the audio is just as good even if I did add video to the mix. I will admit the video is rather jumpy and low resolution but hey it's free and let's us talk for hours about a third of the way around the earth! The important part is that the voice is as good or better than a land based phone across town. Adding the video is not quite the same as being with her but it's sure close. Now for the arrgh. They just released version 3! This one allows desktop sharing, a shared whiteboard, conference calls, and a ton of mashups and widgets from the web, they are also offering some Web 2.0 services of their own to compete with other services out there like Picasa, Flickr, etc. From what I can tell this is rapidly becoming a Web 2.0/3.0 product. I have to admit that many of the new products only work on Windows so I'm safe from them but can anyone keep up here?

Of course as hard as it is to keep up with Skype, last night I discovered that there is no keeping up with Flash. Several kids regularly go to Disney.com to play online games at ImaginOn. This is a very popular site for younger kids but last night it was no go at the library. Disney has bought into the latest version of Flash and we are a version behind. I put in a Help Desk Ticket about it and it seems we had been running Flash 7 up until very recently when we were upgraded to 8. I guess Disney skipped right over 8 and went straight to 9 because they won't let you do anything on their site without upgrading to 9. All you can do is click on the download the upgrade link. Poor IT, when a high demand online service does this, we are forced to ask to respond.

Skype fun and function

Okay I should be able to do this with iChat since we both have macs but for some reason we can't connect now we are on different networks. But Skype not only let's use talk between my old and soon to be laid t rest PC and her mac but also both of our Mac's with only one issue fixed with a headphone to eliminate the feedback of our mics picking up the other's voice out of the speakers. Anyway this past weekend we had about 3 conversations and could have included her sister if she had the time. We use Gmail chat a lot too but the voice is better. I need to get her a webcam so we can turn it into video calls. Since the daughter I'm talking to is in Bø, Telemark, Norway, this is really wonderful.

Of course, at the risk of showing my age, I will say that I remember when a call between Alaska and Alabama through the regular telephone system was full of delays and frustration. It was 1972 and my brother was living in Kodiak Alaska. There was at least a 5-15 second delay between when I finished speaking and when he heard me finish, again a similar delay between his starting and my hearing him. It was far more like CB or Ham radio than a phone call. Skype isn't substancially different from using a telephone to talk to someone in the same building. It is another case of our flattening world.