What I found fascinating is how six people who didn’t know each other before the call could have a meaningful conversation about new marketing without a lot of warm up from the host. I’d expect even better results for workgroups and other teams where the participants are known and the conversation focused on the task at hand. Or just to chat with your friends. The video quality was good enough to make this service useful for regular team meetings in lieu of the conference room.

The ooVoo client comes in two flavors, the expected Windows and normally ignored-until-later Mac (although this is still in closed alpha, at the moment). I installed this onto my Macbook running Leopard last week and it seemed to connect to ooVoo fine. When I updated to a new build this morning, it didn’t seem to want to run on Leopard giving me an error message saying ooVoo was, “…not supported on this architecture.” But this is to be expected with alpha code. My install on my underpowered Windows Vista box went as expected and the software worked fine until freezing about 35 minutes into our call. We reconnected fine a few minutes later so this problem might have been an issue with my rather meager system, below ooVoo’s published spec.

Since ooVoo includes the ability to record your call, this creates content that can be re-purposed online in a number of ways. I expect to see a portion of this conversation posted sometime soon as an example of how ooVoo will take advantage of and extend this promotion. I think this technology also has some interesting applications for podcasters who can now do video interviews easily and turn them into video podcasts. I think I might try this with my podcast sometime later in the year.

Jaffe calls ooVoo, “Social Video.” He might be onto something. Check it out for yourself here.

Update: I was able to install the current Mac alpha build and get ooVoo to run in my full admin account. My normal Mac user account does not have admin privileges and ooVoo continues to vex me with permissions issues. I will try to use my Mac on my next ooVoo conference on Wednesday night.