Skype 3 Beta is available, including large multli-party Skypecast which has been around in test form for a few months (Click to enlarge image).

Last week I gave it a pretty heavy test drive…

Good news: Same easy install; simple interface; public IRC-style chats can be easily set up and people invited in via URL; browser plugin auto-parses/highlights phone numbers anywhere on page to make them all 1-click-to-call (very nice IMHO); multi-user talk-radio-style Skypcasts easy to set up.

The bad news (not so bad for a beta release, but caused me some grief, so I hope the team can resolve these soon): major firewall problems prevent me from using it at work – so I ran my tests at home – whereas Skype 2.x is fine in this respect; Skypecasts are riddled with too much ‘can you hear me?’, ‘am I on now’, ‘who is speaking?’, and audio noise, largely an artifact of full-duplex mode (see details immediately below).

What do I mean about the artifact of full-duplex mode? Here I’ll repeat what I wrote in a Skype forum posting:

The old VoxChat from about 10 years ago was a short-term runaway success and had both a key strength and a key weakness worth noting here (because I think it’s really important for Skypecasts to succeed):

the key strength is that they relied on ‘push-to-talk’: some people moan about push-to-talk buttons but it can be made very simple with a ‘sticky key’ (that the moderator can override), and has the great advantage of making the ‘talking indicator’ trivial to implement; for very large discussion rooms, it is also a great way to observe the ebb-and-flow of the discussion, since you always know who is talking

the key weakness that ultimately killed them was sound-card dependency and lots of audio debugging nightmares… which nowadays are mostly resolved on modern machines.. moreover Skype has made it a lot simpler for people to test and setup! The reason I mention this weakness is that you just need be careful that every Skypecast isn’t ‘sunk’ by poor audio, intrusive lurkers, lots of background noise because of too many people speaking at once,etc.: *MOST* of these problems can be eliminated by switching to a push-to-talk style…. which is why I mention it…

at the very least, push-to-talk ought to be a moderator option when the Skypecast is created!

Push-to-talk, or half-duplex mode, demonstrably works for large groups, whereas full duplex, for more than 2 people on the internet, is demonstrably awful (unless you implement some fancy voice-tracking to show who is speaking, but even then noise and latency spoil the party). Heck, FlashMeeting has been using half-duplex / push-to-talk for years, and scales up beautifully for this very reason. Indeed, FlashMeeting 3 has recently been launched, with tons of new features (read the KMi Planet News Story about it).

Here’s a handy thumbnail of a screen snapshot taken during a recent FlashMeeting I participated in. (Click to enlarge). What’s the big deal? The big deal is that we have 15 participants from all over Europe engaged in a mission-critical videoconference from their desktops, all in a Flash app for which they only needed a URL to join. If someone ‘has the floor’ (large image on the left), all you can do is ‘raise your hand’ to join the queue – there are 3 already in the queue in this snapshot. If you can’t wait, you can hit the interrupt button. Guess what? It really works. People rarely interrupt unless there’s a need, and the flow of the meeting/discussion is consequently very smooth. Cameras are optional, in fact, so running this like ‘internet talk radio’ is really trivial – and the quality is always excellent, because only one stream at a time is competing for your attention.

Technorati Tags: skype, skypecast, voip, flash, flashmeeting, synchronous, audio

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