Oovoo

For the last two days, I’ve been intermittently trying out a new piece of videoconferencing software called Oovoo. I found it becaue Oovoo launched on Twitter, offering to host a series of “MyOovooDays” in which “famous” Twitter people and bloggers hosted conversations, and in return Oovoo supported the FrozenPeaFund, a cancer fund that started when Twitter user and artist Susan Reynolds was diagnosed with breast cancer.

When that happened, Twitter users from all over the world adopted PEAvatars, named for the frozen peas Susan put on her boobs to lessen the pain after her biopsy. And after her mastectomy, her friends founded the fund and we are all working to raise money for it and to support her and at least one other cancer survivor on Twitter, a woman I only know as @whymommy.

There has been a lot written about how Twitter came together around Susan’s cancer, and so I wanted to support Oovoo’s support for Susan :-)

And I’ve had two days of big fun, meeting in person some of the people I have been “talking” to on Twitter for the past year or so. Yesterday, I spend part of the afternoon with Susan herself on her birthday. And with her were Connie Reece
, KathrynJones and Todd Jordan.

This morning, the host was Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb
, the conversation was about video tools, and Doug Haslam, Laura Fitton and I participated.

Okay, so how was the experience?

I loved it. it was easy to use, and I can see that Oovoo is good for small meetings, panels, presentation practice, and planning sessions. I hope it stays free! Especially since it seems to work on the Mac without headphones or a mike, with the internal iSight camera that comes in the MacBook Pro. Which means even a dog can do it!

Update: Doug Haslam just told me that the fifth person in the photo above, whom I only identified as Podcast 411, is Rob Walch of Wizzard Media. Thanks!