Mozilla Combines Social API and WebRTC 44
theweatherelectric writes "Mozilla has put together a demo which combines WebRTC with Firefox's Social API. Over on Mozilla's Future Releases blog, Maire Reavy writes, 'WebRTC is a powerful new tool that enables web app developers to include real-time video calling and data sharing capabilities in their products. While many of us are excited about WebRTC because it will enable several cool gaming applications and improve the performance and availability of video conferencing apps, WebRTC is proving to be a great tool for social apps. Sometimes when you're chatting with a friend, you just want to click on their name and see and talk with them in real-time. Imagine being able to do that without any glitches or hassles, and then while talking with them, easily share almost anything on your computer or device: vacation photos, memorable videos — or even just a link to a news story you thought they might be interested in – simply by dragging the item into your video chat window.'"
Re:Some Neck Beard Action (Score:2, Insightful)
You're going to get modded down (probably rightly so) for your flame presentation, but your content is true: the thing that most slashdotters don't appreciate is that 99.99% of the world does not use computers to "hack out perl scripts and learn that exciting new regular expression syntax". They use computing to socialize. It's an extension of their social circle, which explains why things like Facebook are so wildly popular. But it's certainly true that a certain segment of the population doesn't get this, and is offended that "their" technology is being used by the unwashed masses for things as mundane as socialization.
Humans are social creatures and social computing is only going to become more and more important to daily life as time goes on. I think it's much like... gearheads being annoyed that anyone can buy a car now and run it for 200,000 miles without having to know how to replace head gaskets and so on. It took "their" hobby and made it far less relevant, so that reliable cars are accessible to anyone. Since it's less exclusive now, they have suffered a loss of their club. The same thing has happened to the oldschool command-line computer hackers. They're seeing the world at large adopt technology, and use it in their normal day to day lives, and they don't like it one bit.
iChat (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine being able to do that without any glitches or hassles, and then while talking with them, easily share almost anything on your computer or device: vacation photos, memorable videos â" or even just a link to a news story you thought they might be interested in â" simply by dragging the item into your video chat window.'"
In other words, what iChat has allowed me to do for half a decade? I've used it to run contract negotiations with the contract document shared via iChat to all parties, for example.
So what exactly is new here?
Re:iChat (Score:5, Insightful)