Rabbit and Glide give glimpse of video chat future

Video chat is becoming more sophisticated and social, with developers working out how better to combine media streams and groups of friends in online conversation.

Rabbit, which launches in beta today on Macs, was designed by game developers and introduces more visually appealing video chatrooms and easier ways to connect with friends. Glide, which debuted at Macworld last week, offers a video group walkie-talkie service on the iPhone. Both are free to download and use.

San Francisco-based Rabbit offers a downloadable application for Macs that can fill the screen with an attractive interface showing circles of friends in group conversations (it also works in a minimised mode when you want to talk while working on something else). Facebook friends can be invited to the service and there is a useful drop-down list of who is online and what chatrooms they are visiting, making it easy to hook up.

Users can create their own chatrooms, potential visitors can hover over them to get a snatch of the conversation to decide whether to join. Users’ faces are in circles rather than squares and are live video representations rather than photos.

“Because all of us have come from games, we’ve really approached this in a different way,” Stephanie Morgan, co-founder, told me during a demonstration.

“It was really important for us for video chat not to be a utility, which is what video conferencing has been – we wanted to make something beautiful, seamless and effortless in terms of meeting people and sharing something,”

Sharing means anything on the desktop can be shared with other users, such as documents, photos, videos and music. Services such as YouTube, Spotify and Hulu can be launched from a “Share pad” so everyone can watch a favourite programme together, for example, and discuss it while in progress.

For someone to share a subscription channel with friends this way, such as a sports package, the room would have to be made private rather than public. “Then it’s like having friends over to watch something at your house,” says Ms Morgan about the legality.

I was impressed with the look as well as the ease of finding friends, creating rooms on the fly and sharing content. It is a significant advance on anything offered by the major services such as Skype and Google Hangouts.

Glide is an advance on audio walkie-talkie apps like Voxer, which were themselves a step up from text messaging. With Glide, you can record video messages that appear in a stream of videos as you converse with friends. They can also be interspersed with text messages. It’s instant and it seemed live at times as I was involved in video exchanges, which made me wonder why I should not just use something like Facetime.

But Glide preserves a permanent record of the conversation stream for you to review and it can be useful for leaving video voicemails for people or having extended text and video conversations over time rather than a live one. The group video messaging, where up to 15 friends can be part of the chat, is another useful feature – if you can stand the noise.