I used to lead the development team for Yahoo! Answers, which was split between London, UK and Mission College, CA. Because of the massive time difference (8 ho

I used to lead the development team for Yahoo! Answers, which was split between London, UK and Mission College, CA. Because of the massive time difference (8 hours, or an entire working day), collaboration was hard. We got by with a mix of the following: - Weekly conference calls via video chat. For those with less budget than Yahoo!, Skype would suffice; - Adobe Connect with screen sharing and shared chat for tech demos or presentations. It's the easiest to install and seems to work the best on iffy connections; - Shared collaboration areas (Wikis and mailing lists) to dump things when others are offline; - IM and IRC for "hi can you look at this?" type questions, or link sharing; and - Conference calls on the phone for targeted meetings (the productivity cost of a phone call is too high to have it frequently - people can work on their laptops in video conferences if they need to). Between all these things we just about got by - I'd like to add the voices in the comments saying that face time is still very important. We'd typically fly to Santa Clara once or twice a year for either an entire sprint or for specific architectural/product meetings.