Social Glass

This is well worth the 10 minutes:

The Business of APIs Conference went well.  Mashery put on a great conference, and over 200 people attended.  There was an ensemble of impressive speakers, including Michele Azar of Bestbuy, Marc Frons of New York Times and Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures.  And then there was me.  Checkout my presentation below:

I manage a number of software developers and quality assurance specialists.  Most of them live and work in San Diego.  But others are scattered across various US states and in China.  It’s challenging to create a sense of culture and community given this fact, and I’d be lost if it weren’t for Skype and tinychat.  Tinychat is a free video conferencing solution that allows me to connect my teams in a more personal way.  Body-language is an invaluable communication medium (especially with teams that speak English as a second language).  I find it easier to get a read on somebody if they’re frustrated or don’t understand what is being said, and often I’ll pause and allow those who did understand time to translate to the others.  And who can doubt the communicative value of a “thumbs up” or smile?

The audio features on Tinychat aren’t stellar, so I find I use Skype for audio and tinychat for video when in a conferencing situation.  When it’s a one on one situation I’ll use only Skype.

I’ll never go back to straight audio conference calls.  It’d be like flying international business class, then going back to economy when business class is free.  Ludicrous.

We use Skype all the time at work to communicate with our remote teams.  Most of my conference calls are done with Skype, and to be honest the call quality is better than what we get with our ip phone-base conferencing system.  We use MSN for private IM conversations, and Yammer for public IM conversations (Yammer rocks).

But (back to phones) what I find interesting is that social etiquette is different when conference calls have video than when they don’t.  Today, for example, I had a conference call with two people who’d never met in person (but had spoken on the phone).  Through the Skype video link they could both see each other.  I felt compelled to introduce them.  They felt compelled to be introduced.  The etiquette, when there’s video, is much more like it is when people interact in-person.  And that’s what I love about it.  It creates a more personal bond between collaborators.

I couldn’t imagine managing a remote team without Skype.

Aaron Fulkerson over at Mindtouch recently sat down with Scoble to talk about Deki Wiki.  Check out the video.