FaceToFace Next Big Thing?

I was mulling over my notes for today’s AMA Hot Topic presentation in Chicago — I’m talking about pod/videocasting and the power laws — when  I saw Michael Arrington’s rumor about YouTube getting acquired:

[ from TechCrunch  » YouTube Acquisition Rumors]

Rumors are flying that Silicon Valley based YouTube (profiled here) has signed an agreement to be acquired. This has been confirmed by three independent sources. 

Video is hot. The convergence is everywhere: the video iPod, video instant messaging, and new cell phones (like the Nokia N90 I have been horsing around with) that support video phone calls. But the thing we all want, even if we don’t know it, is not there yet: F2F. Yes, face-to-face.

Imagine a not-too-distant future, when a new level of interoperability exists, and we will have ubiquitous, real-time F2F video communication:

• You are in the taxi on the way to the airport, and I am working at home on my Mac. You call from your next gen cell, and I answer on my Mac, and we are communicating with high-quality video. On my end, I am using some IM/VoIP product, say Gizmo. On yours, you are using Cingular.
• I am browsing eBay, and see some product in an auction, and note the presence indicator of the seller is green — meaning she is available to talk. I call her, using, again, a Mac desktop client, and she answers using Skype on a PDA.
• I try to reach my friend from my cell, and leave a video message since he is unavailable. I can use a similar process, provided by my cell phone provider, to record videocasts and post them at my blog.

I could go on, but you get the point. It’s all happening. But there is something critical missing: many of the players I mention are going down the path of the major IM services. They are walled gardens, with little or limited interoperability. The interesting thing is that the lowest common denominator — plain old telephone — may wind up being good enough to connect the disparate pieces. Skype, Vonage, and Gizmo are all supporting calling out to conventional phone systems for voice calls. It’s a no brainer. And as those POTS systems start to support video — in the cell services first — then we will have interoperability among video solutions… maybe before we have it for text messaging, which is ridiculous, but may actually happen.