July 06, 2011, 4:56 PM — Facebook's new video chat feature--touted in a demo today at the company's headquarters as extremely easy to use--proved buggy in our initial tests.
In Facebook's demo, representatives appeared to show that you only need to approve the video chat applet, which loads in your browser, to start chatting. They said no download is necessary.
However, we found the software installation more complicated than Facebook demonstrated. When we tested the new chat feature on both Windows and Mac PCs, we were prompted to download and install the video chat software outside of the browser. This makes the chat set-up no simpler than gChat's video-calling feature. (Note: Facebook's chat does not yet work on Linux.)
Once the software is installed, the concept is that you should be able to initiate a video call with any of your friends. In our testing, however, the service looked and sounded extremely choppy on every computer we tested with. Video frame rates were extremely low, the audio cut in and out, and trying to chat with more than one person in a frame--as Facebook did in its demo today--resulted in even lousier video quality.
While there's always the possibility of first-day jitters, Facebook confirmed in its Q&A today that the service was a direct peer-to-peer connection. This means that you are connected from your PC to the PC of the person you are trying to chat with, so server overload shouldn't be an issue. Perhaps the service simply needs a little more work.
In addition to the video and audio problems our testing produced, numerous bugs, which included connection and install issues on multiple computers, the chat failing to recognize cameras, failing to install the software when Facebook reflected that the software would be installed, and failing to initiate chats. Most of these issues simply required us to reload our Facebook window and try again, but this certainly isn't yet the pick-up and play video feature for "your least tech savvy friend" that Facebook representatives touted it as.
New Feature: Video Voicemail
Perhaps the most interesting new feature is one Facebook failed to mention in its press conference this morning: Video voicemail. If your friend doesn't pick up when you try to initiate a video call, Facebook allows you to leave a video message for them. The message is waiting as a streaming video the next time your friend logs on or checks messages. While the video quality doesn't seem much better than a regular video chat, these messages have some interesting possibilities that Facebook could build on.
While there are a lot of exciting features here and in the other chat improvements--including group chat and a new chat interface that Facebook announced today--I can't shake the feeling that all of this feels a little half-baked. Today's launch may have been more in response to last week's Google+ announcement than the fact that the Facebook chat service was ready to go live.
Have you tested Facebook video chat yet? What are your impressions?
