Need for a common online video call platform

Technology evolves itself day after another, enhancing and optimizing the way we perform any operation making it easier and efficient with time.

When email was in its early days, people could send emails only to the persons having email on the same server. Like AOL user could not send mail to a user on some other email server. Similarly, when cell phones were in early days pictures and video messages could not be sent on a mobile on another network. But with time, we came out of the limitation finding out the solutions which offer us a common platform removing these communication barriers.

Same is the case with Video Chat these days. Most popular video chat engines namely Skype and Google Chat and even the less popular ones, they all lag in one common factor - Cross platform video chat. A user using Skype cant call a person using GMail for video chat with his GMail friends. There is an enormous need for an open video chat platform which is common to all video chat engines. A video chat platform which is ubiquitous so that users on various servers can communicate with each other.

About 11 months back, Apple's CEO Steve Jobs had announced about FaceTime, which was expected to offer common video call platform and it was full of open standards. Apple announced to make it an open video call standard but failed to proceed any further in this line even after long 11 months though Apple officials deny for the same. The prospect behind FaceTime was to unite all video call servers to a universal platform so that a person on Google server can communicate with someone on Skype server. But the idea is yet to be realized and there is no such progress or any news about the same. Meanwhile, Microsoft has purchased the very popular Skype last week which is already having 170 millions users worldwide. Microsoft is also putting efforts into generalizing the Skype for non-windows platform but the need for the common video call platform is still the same.

Top three IT giants namely Apple, Google and Microsoft are all into video call technology more or less but still we are lacking for the common platform like we have in emails and cellphones.