lab 15

SKYPE
Strengths
- Ability to play games with buddy
- People search
- History
- Online status
- Organizational options
- Can text and talk
- Sound testing
- Fun
- File Sharing

Weaknesses
- Kind of difficult to use
- Video quality
- Voice Quality
- Advertisements

GOOGLE
Strengths
- Medium video quality
- Sound quality is good
- Can make video large or small
- Simple

Weaknesses
- Very plain
- Kind of hard to use
- No sound options
- No video options
- No text option
- No file sharing
- No games
- Just not very many options at all
- No real interface
- Difficult to start
- Boring

YAHOO!
Strengths
- Ability to play games with buddy
- Can translate incoming and outgoing messages
- File sharing
- Can change environment
- Can send text as well
- Ability to appear offline
- Ability to create an avatar
- Sound testing
- Fun, but not as fun as Skype

Weaknesses
- Not the easiest to use
- Video quality


Compare and Contrasts
Well first of all these are all great services. These services can provide an alternative to cell phones. Google, Skype, and Yahoo are all free, and all offer video chat services. These Services are all really cool because you can actually see the person that you are talking too. However in order to use these programs you have to be connected to the internet, and the other person you want to talk to has to be using the same service.

I’ll start off with Skype. Skype has some cool things that Google and Yahoo don’t. It has the ability to let a person search for other people by name, e-mail address, or Skype name. Skype also had a cool perk that allows a person to view their chat history. The other services only offer searches by their online names. Skype also offers a few different online status options, that Google does not offer at all and Yahoo only offers two. It was very easy to figure out how to start and end a call on Skype as well. The other services were not as intuitive as Skype. Google chat I thought was near impossible to figure out how to start a video chat, but once you did it was the most boring service out there. Yahoo chat had a pretty easy call start and call end process too, but I just liked Skype better.

Now I thought Google was the worst of all the services. The only thing Google chat offered that Skype and Yahoo didn’t was simplicity. Skype, and Yahoo both had more options available, games to play, and the option to text and talk. There is not much to say about Google chat except for that the video quality was decent compared to Skype and Yahoo. However, once you got Google chat up and running it got very boring very fast. Google didn’t offer game play between you and your buddy, a text option, or any other options like Skype and Yahoo offered. Besides being boring, I found Google’s interface to be very difficult to use. It took me the longest time to figure out how to make a call.

Yahoo would be my second choice in video chat services. Some really cool things that Yahoo offered which no other service had were the ability to create an avatar, translate incoming and outgoing messages, and you can change the background of that chat window. However, I thought Yahoo’s video quality was the worst. The other services had better video quality. I also thought Yahoo was difficult to use. Skype was easier to use, and Google was the hardest to get started. One great thing I liked about Yahoo was the ability to play games with your buddy. The games option is a great tool if you are having a dull conversation and need to spice things up. Skype also had game play available, but Google did not. Yahoo was overall a good service. The interface was not that hard to use, and the quality of service and excitement of Yahoo chat was good as well, but I found Skype to be just a little bit better in every category.

My favorite service out of all of these was Skype. I really liked all of the options that Skype offered like all of the games. The video service was not the best, but not one service’s video or sound quality was much better than the rest. I also like that Skype’s only business is video chat, unlike Yahoo and Google which do e-mail and many other things, which divert their attention to other services of their company. Skype also had the easiest interface to navigate around. Many things on Skype I found to be very intuitive like making a call, choosing someone to talk to, searching for people, and playing games. Overall I liked skype because it had good quality, it was easy to use, and it was fun.