UserPlane + AOL sitting in a tree

UserPlane was bought by AOL a while back. There was much less coverage of it than the purchase of YouTube by Google, but I think it is almost as an important, certainly for the future of AOL.

UserPlane is a online chat tool, but combines the abilty to not just chat, but includes audio, video and file sharing. It is one step shy of tools such as Webex, or Microsoft's LiveMeeting, but it is free. If you can stand the advertising, and convince your friends to sign up, you can have a real live videoconference. The most important aspect of this is that the user does not have to have anything other than a browser and the most current version of the flash plugin. It uses the Flash Communication Server backend to do it's magic. People can create their own customized chat that appears right in their website.

I very much believe that this sort of service is the next big thing in online communication. We are still using tools that work best for non-synchronous communication (email, blogs, etc) but when we look at online gaming, it is the feeling that things are happening in realtime, that you are interacting with others, that makes these experiences compelling -- it is quite addictive. The reason it is not widespread has to do limitations of connectivity, complexity (it is too hard to set up) and simply because people are not necessarily comfortable with that. But when I watch the spread of Jabber use in our organization, it is clear that it offers advantages that a telephone can't -- namely the ability to push content (not just voice) to another user. This kind of experience is more natural than a simple text chat.

My guess is that AOL will roll this into their existing subscriber services at some point, making it a little more compelling reason to use their services. But then Google will come out with something similar, but Free ;-)

--hal