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I have Gmail, like many of you do. Over the past months, Google has been adding handy scripts to enhance the experience. Just the other day, they added the possibility for you to do live video chat with your friends. All you need is a Webcam, and the small download to install from Google.

I was looking in my account to see who happened to be online while I was recording this video. Looks like my friend Rick from Geeks and the live community. I connected with him, and was amazed at the high quality of this service. Both the image and voice quality are of the highest caliber.

It’s not going to get any easier than this, really. Just point and click, that’s all there is to it. You can pop the video out of the regular browsing experience, so you can continue to surf online while you are video chatting with someone. I’ve never really seen something like this done in a better fashion. Kudos to Google.

FirstRSS ERROR: "http://shop.tagjag.com/products/google" NOT FOUND!

Want to embed this video on your own site, blog, or forum? Use this code or download the video:

<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/nVs5H35e9RA"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/nVs5H35e9RA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object><br /><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/">Chris</a> | <a href="http://live.pirillo.com/">Live Tech Support</a> | <a href="http://media.pirillo.com/">Video Help</a> | <a href="http://feeds.pirillo.com/ChrisPirilloShow">Add to iTunes</a>

Are You Using Audio and Video in Gmail Yet?

If you run Skype outside of a NAT configuration, you may be passing traffic as a supernode. Skype’s documentation claims the impact of this extra traffic is negligible, but you can prevent your Skype client / connection from becoming a supernode altogether:

• Beginning with Skype 3.0, an explicit switch is provided in the registry settings to allow the disabling of supernode functionality.
• Any computer hosted on a network that is behind a network address translation (NAT) device or restrictive firewall will disable supernode functionality.
• Skype clients behind an HTTP or SOCKS5 proxy will not serve as supernodes.

I’m guessing that most of you are behind a router with NAT, but the University of Waterloo has a fantastic wiki page with further Skype tweaks in relation to the supernode feature.

Are You a Skype Supernode?

For the life of me, I could not figure out why I was only getting audio out of my right MacBookPro speaker. Live chatter Eric Wrixon made the reason abundandly clear:

I think I might know why your Skype client on your Macbook Pro only plays audio out of the right speaker. If I’m not mistaken the microphone on the MBP is located under the left speaker grille. If the audio in your Skype conversation was played back through the left speaker it would generate a lot of nasty feedback into the mic. The client may be purposely using only the right speaker to reduce the amount of microphone feedback. I don’t know if that really is the reason for the Mac client using only the right speaker, but it sounds like a reasonable explanation to me.

Makes total sense to me now.

Skype Audio Problems on the MacBook Pro

From Skype Journal, although the permalink for the article is currently 404:

Effectively without telling you Skype has raised the cost of every Skype Call. They call it a connection fee. So you make a less than 30 second call and leave a quick voicemail. In the good old days of SkypeOut this action cost you 2 cents. You would probably be surprised to learn that today the same call will cost 6 cents. Not much if all your calls are one hour long. A huge amount if the other person isn’t there.

I’m getting ready to start using the Pro version of Pamela to start recording video… should I be holding off?

Skype Increases Cost of Calls, Silently?