One of the greatest gifts the web has given me is the ability to have video chats with my children who are in school far-away. Indeed, for my wife, if Apple video iChat were the only application on her computer, she would still think the computer was the greatest device ever. For me, video chat is the fulfillment of the long-promised “picture phone.” Even when you can’t actually be in the same physical space with them, there’s something about seeing your children eye-to-eye that communicates more than a voice conversation.

Apple iChat is great, but…

If both (or all) parties have enough bandwidth in their connection to the Internet, Apple iChat works intuitively and, frankly, never fails to awe me, despite having used it for years.

That’s the good part. Here’s the bad: It takes lots of “ifs” to make it work with ease and intuitively: iChat is only available for the Mac OS. If everyone has good bandwidth. If everyone knows how to manage firewall features, then it’s a marvel, but…

If you’re using iChat and want to video chat with someone not using a Mac and iChat, using, say, a PC and an AIM account, it’s supposed to work. However, if you’re like me, you’re going to find yourself never being able to quite get all the parties with the right versions and camera setups and preference settings and correct bandwidth, etc. I’m sure it works great for somebody out there, but not me.

Looking for alternatives

I’m always looking for solutions that will make video chatting with someone using a PC as easy as it is for someone using a Mac. Skype reportedly works pretty good, but I’ll admit that I’ve only used it with people who have Macs on the other end, so I’m not sure about the PC bridge. And now, Google has rolled-out gmail video chat, so that might be the answer. I can’t wait to try it out, but my first attempt required the other person to upgrade an OS version and that’s not in the cards.

Today, Lifehacker has a round-up of five video chat applications. Maybe one of those will be the perfect solution.

One day, I hope video chat is as ubiquitous as text chatting or voice-chatting (something we used to call talking on the phone).

And one day, I hope we’ll have the other futuristic gizmo promised my entire life: flying cars.

[Note: I now (see comments) realize that the feature being reported today is not the two-week old one I thought it was, but a new, very similar feature that allows you to point to an exact timestamp on a YouTube video.]

When I saw on my RSS newsreader this morning that TechMeme was pointing to a story on TechCrunch about YouTube enabling users to change the “time code” parameter on embedded videos*, I thought the feed was messed up. Granted, I’ve started focusing most of my tech-blog watching to the weekends, but I swear that news sounds familiar.

Oh, wait, now I remember: Two weeks ago the feature was reported by the Google Operating System blog and spent several hours on Techmeme. However, I assume that on that day it got lost in all the stories about Web 2.0 companies laying off employees. (Not that RexBlog is where you should be getting your breaking tech news, but even I mentioned (and used) the time-stamp parameter setting feature on a post about Pacman Jones a couple of weeks ago.

Deja vu or not, it’s a nice feature.

By the way, here is a list of several ways you can adjust the parameters when you embed a YouTube video.

*Translation for the non-geekish: In other words, if you’d like to embed a video on your website or blog, but have the clip begin at a specific spot in the video rather than at the beginning, you can simply change a tiny bit of code to that “copy and past” stuff you use to embed it. If you’ve followed me this far, here’s the code you change: “#t=2m15s” ['m' and 's' mean seconds and minutes, so just change the numbers to the spot where you want the clip to begin]. Also, a work-around hack has been available for a long time using splicd.com.

With this innovative video/transcript archival feature chronicling last night’s Veep debate (and last week’s first debate), the New York Times is displaying what a news website of record should be: The definitive spot where news-related media is collected, curated, analyzed and then organized in various ways that allow individuals to search and easily find everything they need to make up their own minds. For more of their interactive campaign features, visit here.

Sidenotes: Information design wonks will love the elegance of the interface of the video archive — the timeline especially. And on the business side, note that the archive has a single sponsor who gets lots of visibility thanks to the lack of noise on the page.

(via: waxy.org/links)

An excerpt from Errol Morris’ emotional film about cancer survivors and relatives of people who died from cancer. (StandUp2Cancer.org.)

This morning, Amazon.com emailed me (and I assume a gazillion other participants in its affiliate program) a promotion to check out its “Your Video Widget” service that includes a feature like the new “annotation tool” on YouTube. But with Amazon, the creator of the video can annotate the video with links to products on Amazon. If the viewer clicks through and purchases the item, the video creator will receive a commission. While I’ve never had much luck with affiliate revenues (on other sites, not here), it sounds like a great idea for review-intensive content sites.

But here’s the problem. When I clicked through to learn about the new service, the “demo” version of the new feature would not allow me to see the featured products. In other words, the feature being demo’d didn’t work on the demo. All I got was a video with a message that looked like this:

Not a good way to launch a feature, Amazon.

I’m sure there will be lots of chatter suggesting Flickr is way late to the video party. Of course, the reality is that those who live far out on the leading edge often lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of people still don’t even share photos via e-mail. The majority of people still don’t have digital cameras, much less some easy-to-download means of capturing video. And what Flickr is doing — starting out by allowing only 90 second videos — makes it clear that they’re not trying to be another YouTube — this is something different.

But, then, I confess. I love Flickr. I love just about everything about it. While there’s a “free” version, it’s one of the few online services I gladly pay an annual fee for a “Pro” version due to its incredible array of services and features. It’s one of the few services I use that I believe is just about perfect.

I shoot video and photography using the same camera (well, most of the time) and I upload them both to the same desktop software (iPhoto), so why wouldn’t I want to save and share them on the web using the same service? It just makes sense to me.

I’ll still use YouTube, just not the same way I’ll use Flickr.

Later: Some folks are already harping on the ‘90 second’ limitation. While I think Flickr will probably expand this time limit later, the time-collar is actually an opportunity for thinking about video in a new way — in my opinion. One of the challenges with video is the editing process — it’s a new skill for most of us. However, sharing video doesn’t have to be limited to the linear narrative piece we’ve come to expect after years of watching TV. In reality, those linear pieces are typically a series of clips. What if, using a Flickr set, you can present those clips in a way in which the viewer can understand why they are being grouped together, but watch them in a new non-linear way? For example, people can already present non-linear video stories on a map, for example — posting small clips of video on maps using the MyMaps feature of Google Maps (example, how-to). Flickr’s new feature will enable this type of video story-telling as well. Here is a great insta-tutorial from Andrew Baron (of Rocketbook) about using Flickr sets to present a series of videos in a way that could be very helpful to viewers. (Andrew’s post via Twitter from Dave Winer)

I’ll be experimenting in the morning and will update this post with quick review then.

In the meantime, here is an embed of the video Flickr used to launch the service: