Shayan Zadeh: Practical Entrepreneur

In general, when we’re talking on the phone or chatting on the internet with another person, we don’t want that other person to ‘see’ us. In the visual sense. I know this is a very broad statement that many will disagree with, but my own experience releasing such functionality, as well as feedback I’ve received from others regarding their experiences, provide proof in favor of this theory.

I grant that video chatting with “people you know” can be useful in certain instances. The two most salient examples I can think of are (1) using video chat to keep in touch with family members, or (2) for work collaboration (e.g. video conferencing with colleagues remotely). But engaging in video chat with your social graph at large will not have a strong uptake.

At the bottom of this bias is a very basic human fear. Most of the time, people do not feel fully presentable to their extended friend list in video format. In instances where we communicate with casual acquaintances, social anxiety becomes even more of an issue. People attend to their physical appearance before engaging with friends in real world, and for many the process of ‘getting ready to go out’ is a necessary prerequisite before ‘going out’ is even a possibility. We can apply the same social psychology principles to video chat. And people, by and large, have zero interest in ‘getting ready’ to video chat. Text messaging and online chatting, on the other hand, can be performed at any and all levels of hygiene and physical disarray, hence the huge interest and uptake.

When MySpace integration with Skype failed, self-consciousness of users contributed to the failure. I predict that Facebook integration with Skype will similarly be limited by users’ self-consciousness. No chance will it usher in the era of video communication.

Zoosk has offered video chat functionality on Socialbox, providing video chat between Facebook friends, for a while, and consumer interest in this feature has been relatively low (compared to non-video engagement, which has been great). I’m sure the same is happening on Facebook+Skype right now. I’d venture the same will be true for Google+ hangouts, once the initial cool factor goes away.

Nonetheless, like I said, video chat can be (and already is) hugely relevant in a few categories:

• Keeping in touch with family (Skype & Facetime): Higher social mobility has made it possible (and often necessary) to live where opportunity permits. Many of us live at relatively inconvenient distances from members of our families. Video chat is a convenient and powerful tool that many of us use to stay connected to our family members despite the distance. And it goes almost without saying that we have a much lower “presentability” threshold for Mom & Dad .
• Professional collaboration (Skype for conference calls): Complex economic factors require that people in different locations work collaboratively with each other. In such cases video conferencing boosts productivity while slashing costs (in terms of both time and capital). Plus we are (usually) presentable at work already, making additional grooming redundant  .

There might be other categories that I am missing, but those cases must provide a compelling argument against some very basic human biases. And it would require us to overcome a deeply ingrained existential fear: confronting the eternal question of “No, really, how do I look?”