Yesterday it was Google reader’s auto translation, which in itself was quite a clever idea, although admittedly quite uneffective when it comes to asian languages.

And when I got up this morning came Gmail video chat.

I’ve been through MSN video and Skype and not found one with a satisfactory video quality/performance balance. With MSN it was poor quality video but relatively consistent connections and with Skype the video quality was marginally better, but the connection kept dropping out.

This morning I gave Gmail video a go, I found that my Gmail chat kept getting disconnected. This may be due to the fact that everyone else is giving it a go at the same time. BUT I was pleasantly surprised to see how quickly I could get connected to the other party and how good the video quality was. It was quite sharp and free of lag. The sound was pretty good as well. This is probably because of the fact that Google has so much of bandwidth available.

Given that so many people on Gmail now, maybe Gmail video is the way to go for video chats.

Combining it with the email system means that interactions between people who need to have face to face communication along with the exchange of digital information (say an interaction designer) can have the convenience of an information filing system with the perks of visual and audio representation.

For those of us working from home, this may be a powerful means for us to go about conducting our business.