Where is Web Conferencing Going?

In an earlier article I talked about the evolution of the
conference call from a rather limited beginning as an expensive
business to business tool to the present possibilities using
VoIP and the steadily increasing bandwidth available to web
users allowing us to dream of real-time high quality video and
audio.

Existing web conferencing tools tend to fall in about 5 main
groups: centralized forums, groupware, bulletin board systems,
Usenet and mailing lists. A little imagination suggests Chat
rooms and Instant messaging as being similar enough - and with
enough possibilities to be included here.

Chat Rooms and IM have the unique feature of being real-time (or
near real-time systems) whereas the other main groups are
asynchronous. The growing use (at least in the internet
marketing segment) of teleseminars constitutes another form of
web conferencing.

As I watched my wife and children do their chat room and IM
thing, I began to think about my own use of "web conferencing"
software. I don't do chat rooms or IM. The majority of my
interactions are via forums or email with teleseminars coming in
a distant third.

What I find is that many of people with whom I interact are
offset from my schedule by anywhere from 3 to 20 hours. A few
are in, more or less, the same time-zone I am, though their
schedules also vary widely. Some seem to be online close to 24
hours a day, others only during certain periods. And this holds
true even for people in Australia, Singapore, Japan and Eastern
Europe.

I've discovered that I inhabit a virtual world where the people
I work with and communicate with can be anywhere in the world
and have any kind of schedule.

What this means is that until we all start to totally ignore the
sun and the customary habits of pre-virtual life, synchronous
communications are - and will remain - a rarity. The
complexities of organizing a real-time web conference among 30
or 50 people scattered all over the globe, make asynchronous web
conferencing an enduring solution.

Sure, all the latest web conferencing tech in real-time with
interactive audio and video links is very cool. Unfortunately,
it isn't that useful on a day-to-day basis.

I work on the internet and the people I work with and listen to
are scattered all over. I primarily use forums to stay in touch
with them. Most of them I've never talked (audio) to or seen
(video). I've never IMed any one of them. True, I have been in
teleseminars with a few of them, but generally that's limited to
teleseminars oriented toward North American time zones (which
happen to be only slightly offset from mine here in South
America).

Bottom line here is what? If you want to stay in touch with your
peers then you're going to end up using email and forums. For
the foreseeable future. There isn't another decent solution for
global connections. If you are marketing to the greater US, then
definitely go for teleseminars and online real-time interaction
including video as the tech and bandwidth becomes more widely
available. But don't kid yourself, until human nature changes,
the utility of synchronous communication on the internet is
going to remain limited to those within a few time zones of each
other.

About the author:
Richard writes, teaches, trains and consults on business and
professional presentations and eCommerce related matters. For
more on conference calling, web conferencing and related
subjects visit http://altaglobal.com - for wireless and cellular
subjects see http://www.altaglobal.org