It is the plague-times. One of my friends thought that it would be nice to have a remote, on-line, collaborative Happy Hour a couple of times a week. Lovely!!
The tech that immediately came to mind for them was Group FaceTime. Well, that sorta works ... kinda ... more or less. People keep losing connections. There's a huge amount of "Can you hear me now?" ("Apalaca Beachside!") Feedback. Crosstalk. Mic imbalance. Seasickness. (Two of our group insist on using a hand-held phone, which they wave around, generally inducing nausea.) Pretty much the whole thing devolves into a shitshow.
I'm pretty sure, at this point, I don't even need to explicitly pose the question.
I keep hearing about Zoom, which seems ... if not ideal, at least miles better than what we're currently doing!!! Looking at their website, looks like they support a lovely variety of platforms. There's a free version, & also a $15/host/month version with some more features. A couple of my "tech-of-the-moment" friends say that it's good -- way better than available alternatives. Maybe some security concerns? Although ... we're chatting about potato supply-chain, who has toilet paper, & what are cocktails & dinner tonight ... so I'm certainly not concerned about security of content.
Sounds like a no-brainer. The one thing that bothers me ... In Zoom's Terms of Service (zoom.us), at point 7, there's some weird language including:
You may subscribe to ... for business purposes ... & if you are an individual, that the Services are being purchased in a business or professional capacity."
There's just something about that that's so specific & explicit, that it's weirding me out.
Certainly we could justifiably (if necessary, as computer science professionals) aver that we're testing the Zoom services in conjunction with making recommendations to our consulting clientele. Pffft. But there's just something that strikes me badly about that explicit language.
So, evidently, I do have 2 explicit questions:
1) Does anybody happen to have any idea WTF their deal is, to necessitate that??
I don't know about the terms of service but I use zoom so much is it part of me. That is what I use for most everything
We'll be back right after order has been restored here in the Omni Center.
That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy - Swift
I am using the answer to this question: http://askville.amazon.com/askville/OpenQuestionViewer.do?requestId=232658 The first answer is what I use and it works perfectly.
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