4 ms·

Zoom is the best software in the world for this.

epistasis 8y ago
Zoom used to be rock solid, but is also suffering software rot these days. We've been having huge problems with recent updates only being able to talk to some meeting IDs.
deathanatos 8y ago
(I have used both Zoom and Hangouts. These views are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.) Zoom, 1. Needs better call quality. The audio is often … difficult … particularly if both ends are speaking or if one end has too much ambient noise. (That is, it seems like local noise degrades the incoming signal. (To me, it feels like it believes us to be talking, and essentially mutes the incoming signal so as to not cause a feedback loop; but then we can't hear the incoming. IDK.) 2. Numeric meeting IDs are a terrible, horrible UX coming from Hangouts. Joining meeting "foo" vs. joining meeting 904-857-597. (When calendar integration works, it's nice, but sometimes you need to convey a meeting ID over your voice to another human, and "foo" is just so much easier.)
- shadowtree 8y ago
  Every Zoom user can set a vanity URL for their meeting space. Most use their firstname+lastname where I work.
  - deathanatos 8y ago
    Well, TIL that existed. It's not quite what I'm talking about. That link is unique to your user, kind of weirdly, and is some sort of personal meeting room. I'd like to assign names to meetings, not to me; every meeting that I happen to schedule the meeting for shouldn't all have the same name; the name should be descriptive of the meeting itself. That is, a meeting about widget production shouldn't be "suzieqmeet" just b/c Suzie Q. scheduled it; it should be called something like "widget-production". A later meeting about spline reticulation could just be "spline-reticulation"; the URL "meet.vc-company.com/spline-reticulation" is obvious, and trivial to transfer over speech to a coworker. The great thing about Hangout, IIRC, is that it sort of automatically slugifies the meeting subject, so the defaults are pretty close to "magically just works". Trying to convince my entire coworker base to adopt "vanity URLs" is not going to happen, and doesn't really solve the problem.

Zoom used to be rock solid, but is also suffering software rot these days. We've been having huge problems with recent updates only being able to talk to some meeting IDs.

deathanatos 8y ago

(I have used both Zoom and Hangouts. These views are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.) Zoom, 1. Needs better call quality. The audio is often … difficult … particularly if both ends are speaking or if one end has too much ambient noise. (That is, it seems like local noise degrades the incoming signal. (To me, it feels like it believes us to be talking, and essentially mutes the incoming signal so as to not cause a feedback loop; but then we can't hear the incoming. IDK.) 2. Numeric meeting IDs are a terrible, horrible UX coming from Hangouts. Joining meeting "foo" vs. joining meeting 904-857-597. (When calendar integration works, it's nice, but sometimes you need to convey a meeting ID over your voice to another human, and "foo" is just so much easier.)

shadowtree 8y ago
Every Zoom user can set a vanity URL for their meeting space. Most use their firstname+lastname where I work.
- deathanatos 8y ago
  Well, TIL that existed. It's not quite what I'm talking about. That link is unique to your user, kind of weirdly, and is some sort of personal meeting room. I'd like to assign names to meetings, not to me; every meeting that I happen to schedule the meeting for shouldn't all have the same name; the name should be descriptive of the meeting itself. That is, a meeting about widget production shouldn't be "suzieqmeet" just b/c Suzie Q. scheduled it; it should be called something like "widget-production". A later meeting about spline reticulation could just be "spline-reticulation"; the URL "meet.vc-company.com/spline-reticulation" is obvious, and trivial to transfer over speech to a coworker. The great thing about Hangout, IIRC, is that it sort of automatically slugifies the meeting subject, so the defaults are pretty close to "magically just works". Trying to convince my entire coworker base to adopt "vanity URLs" is not going to happen, and doesn't really solve the problem.