I’ve got a feature idea for Skype
As a developer at HubSpot I spend a lot of time in meetings with other developers discussing features or planning future development. We have a great team of people in the office in Cambridge, but we also have a couple of developers overseas and some IT folks in the southern US.
Skype has been awesome for these meetings. We just quickly pull everyone into a conference call and as long as the internet connections are constant we can hear everyone clearly and get our work done together. The only unusual part is that we usually have a group in the Cambridge office connected to several individuals. So the people on Skype talk back to us through a single laptop.
So, that brings me to my feature suggestion. I would love to see a full-screen visualization for a Skype call that takes up the entire screen. It would look sort of like the current Skype conference call view (pictured to the right), but it would have larger images for the participants and lay them out in some kind of grid instead of a vertical list. The images would still have the radiating blue outline to indicate when they are speaking. By having this visualization I can easly project it in the conference room and everyone there can easily see who is on the call and who is talking.
It’s probably not a lot of work for Skype to do this. In fact, maybe someone at Skype has already figured it out and has a beta version kicking around. I know from experience that sometimes having just one user of your software ask for something can make it a priority. So hopefully someone at Skype will see this and put in a good word for my suggestion. I know there would be at least one uber-happy Skype user in the world if they did.
I think that’s a great idea. Simple, but would be highly useful.
Have you tried buying everyone a webcam and then doing a Skype video conference? I think it does what you want, with live video.
Mike,
Unfortunately Skype only does one-on-one video calls right now, and even in the beta version of Skype 4 (which does have a full screen mode) they haven’t lifted the one-to-one restriction.
For me, Skype is primarily a voice-chat service because you can connect to regular phone lines, and you can’t do that with video chat.
Skype is presently able to handle only one-to-one video yet there is a freely available method to employ multi-party video via Skype. Take a look at MeBeam.com and see if this might be of aid. If you desire more there are certainly Skype Extras available for a spot of $$.