Instant Messaging

Instant messaging, be it in the form of SMS, email, or something like WhatsApp (whatsapp.com) is probably one of the most common forms of electronic communication in use today. Type a message to someone and have them receive it almost immediately. Simple and effective. But even with something as innocuous as instant messaging there are potential benefits brought by the Cloud.

Synchronisation is the primary area where improvement can be made: with a Cloud-enabled instant messaging system, message history can be made available no matter which device you happen to have to hand. Even better, when you receive an instant message, you can receive it on multiple devices, so if you don’t happen to have your phone in hand, you can still receive it on a laptop or tablet, for example.

But perhaps a less obvious benefit is security. The popular instant messaging application Telegram (telegram.org), for example, emphasises the privacy of all communication through its service, offering robust encryption of messages and even the ability for them to “self-destruct” after a period of time, something not really possible with other messaging applications (whilst also boasting faster transmission than any other messaging application).

Voice Over IP

For all the benefits that instant messaging provides, sometimes you just can’t beat the sound of someone’s voice for quickly conveying information. Though a telephone is an obvious choice, there are some downsides. First and foremost is cost. Telephone calls are billed by usage, with longer-distance calls typically costing more than local calls. Second, the person you’re trying to call likely has more than one contact number, which means you might need to try each of them in succession until you reach them. And as a minor point, you don’t know if the person you need to speak to is actually available until you try to call them. This is mitigated by some degree by voicemail, but voicemail has plenty of its own issues, such as being somewhat hard to access (typically you can do it only from your own phone, which doesn’t help if your phone happens to be dead at the time).

Enter Voice over IP (VoIP), the Internet-based telephone system. Rather than relying on a traditional phone line, VoIP digitises your voice and then uses the Internet to send it to someone else (and does the same for the recipient). In practice, this means you get the exact same experience as a traditional phone, but using an Internet connection that is already paid for (and doesn’t care about the distance between callers). It does depend on having the right hardware and software, but the hardware is typically built-in to your computer anyway (the requisite microphone and speakers are part of most laptops or mobile devices as standard), and adequate headsets are not hard to come by if it isn’t. As for the software, there’s plenty to choose from that are available for free, and in many cases bundled with your computer’s operating system (such as FaceTime or Skype). That said, this does lead to one of the main problems with VoIP, which is that most of the software is designed around proprietary infrastructure, which in turn means that if you want to call someone using specific software, they’ll likely need to have the same software. In practice you can assume most people who use VoIP at least occasionally will probably have Skype (skype.com) as it’s the most popular service and available on most platforms, whereas Apple aficionados will likely have FaceTime (apple.com), as it’s readily available to anyone with a Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

Naturally, the Cloud can help make even VoIP work better. Using Google Voice, for example, will cause all your devices to ring when you get a call, and is able to both make calls to traditional telephones (for a fee for international calls), as well as receive them, and it even lets you switch between devices during a call. And then it adds in some other features you didn’t even know you wanted, such as the ability to automatically block certain callers, or only allow calls through from certain people or at certain times of the day, conference calling, permanent retention of all text messages and voicemails, and even transcription.

Box 6.1 VoIP and Emergency Calls

Sadly many VoIP services (including those provided by Apple, Google, and Skype outside of a select few locations) do not allow for the ability to make emergency calls (to 911), so the traditional telephone hasn’t lost its usefulness in at least that area yet. Part of the reason for this is that trying to identify a VoIP caller’s geographical location is somewhat unreliable, and there are likely other logistical reasons that make it difficult to implement successfully, but ultimately there’s a significant cost implication that VoIP service providers aren’t willing to absorb for a supposedly “free” service. As such, you’ll see disclaimers with many of these services that they are “not intended as a replacement for your telephone”.

Video Conferencing

It used to be the case that video conferencing was relegated to high-end business communication. The cost and infrastructure required was such that it had to be specifically installed in a fixed location and participants all had to be equipped with the same technology, technology which had a tendency to be complicated to use. In practice, this meant that it was rarely viable to have access to video conferencing technology outside of a board room with staff readily available to provide support.

But just as VoIP democratised voice calls, faster Internet access and an abundance of video-capable devices meant that it was trivial to add live video to VoIP services. Skype, for example, has had this feature since 2005 (merely two years after its original launch), and most of its competition followed suit shortly after. Whereas Skype was primarily aimed at providing ad-hoc calls between a small number of people, other services, such as Citrix’s Go-ToMeeting (gotomeeting.com) can support hundreds of participants, each of whom can connect via a computer, mobile device, or even a browser. As each participant likely has their own video camera, this also means there’s the opportunity to see everyone in close-up, rather than from a zoomedout conference room perspective. Then there’s the ability to share screens— meaning someone can demonstrate software on their laptop or show a presentation, shown full-screen to other participants easily and seamlessly.

Moreover, the Cloud can remove some of limitations of traditional video conferencing without replacing them entirely. For example, the Cloud-based BlueJeans (bluejeans.com) service allows users of a high-end service such as Polycom RealPresence to confer seamlessly with someone using a web browser or mobile device.

Box 6.2 Remote Technical Support

It should be noted that the next step from someone sharing their screen is giving someone else the ability to control their computer. This can be useful for a variety of purposes, such as coaching someone to use software or follow a particular procedure, but it can also serve as a convenient way for someone to provide IT support remotely.

Say, for example, you’re at a remote location on a shoot, and you run into problems with your email client. As long as you have Internet access and the right software, someone from the technical support department could be given access to your laptop from wherever they are based and go in and fix the problem, thus saving time bouncing instructions back and forth over the phone.

Hybrid Communication

Where this gets even more interesting is with products and services that provide several of these communication methods packaged together, so you can start with, say, a messaging system or chat room, and then reply with a voice or video call depending on how the conversation goes.

Perhaps an artist needs some direction with an idea. This could start off with a short verbal brief sent via instant message, to which they then reply with a digitised sketch, and the director can then start a conference call with the artist and other key decision makers to discuss the finer points, with perhaps the artist even sharing her screen and making annotations or changes on the fly.

This is, of course, possible by switching between different applications, but each time people have to switch to another application, there’s the possibility that time will be lost, with anything from having to log in to each service, to having to resolve technical issues, and even the problem of task-switching to be considered. None of these are conducive to the creative process, and effort should be made to be able to transition between different forms of communication as smoothly as possible.

Google Hangouts (hangouts.google.com) is one such example of this. Available from within Google’s Cloud-based email Gmail (gmail.com), their social media site Google+ (plus.google.com), or as a standalone mobile or browser-based app, it looks like a traditional instant message client, but it has readily available buttons to initiate group messaging, and voice or video chat, as well as little touches like easy linking of locations and sync across devices.

Taking this even further are services like Slack (slack.com), which allows messages to be saved to different “channels”, which can represent different teams or topics (or both) that people can subscribe to (and which are fully searchable and persistent), as well as allowing for file attachments, private groups, integrations with other services, and a fully-featured API for custom integrations.

Social Networking

A social network service allows each user to have an online persona (typically represented by a single “page” for each person), and to have them establish links with other users. Facebook (facebook.com), for example, allows users to connect to each other as friends, whilst LinkedIn (linkedin.com) lets users connect to each other via their business relationships. Thus each user forms part of a number of social networks between many people.

In some ways, social networking is merely a logical consequence of the Cloud rather than a separate paradigm. The Cloud provides ways for people to be connected, to share ideas and media, and to do so asynchronously, and all of these things are considered the foundation of any social media platform. As well as allowing users to provide information about themselves to each other (whether for self-promotion or other reasons), social networks also encourage feedback on this information from others.

Different social networking services encourage different behaviour. For example, Twitter is primarily text-based, with an imposed limit on the length of each message, and a model that lends itself better to users broadcasting information rather than engaging in discussion; whereas Facebook tends to be more about sharing media and encouraging discussion. Most other social networking services exist to serve niches, such as Snapchat, which is primarily concerned with communication via images or videos (which are not saved once they’re viewed); Whisper, which allows users to anonymously post messages superimposed over an image; and Bubbly, which allows users to post voice recordings.

Although it can be tempting to think of social networking sites as a good way to form a hub for a production, there are several disadvantages to doing so that make the other options more viable. In general, social media sites exist to serve individuals as opposed to organisations, and as such do not provide any liability that confidential material could be exposed (and indeed, there are several legal reasons why conducting any sort of business on sites like Facebook is a bad idea), nor is there typically a way to administer users (beyond adding or removing them from private groups), which means that the emphasis would be on the production to create, for example, a private group, but on the individuals to set up accounts and join the group. Moreover, any information entered into social media sites is typically very difficult to extract and use elsewhere.

That said, there are plenty of situations where social media sites can be a cost-effective, efficient way to provide communication within a production (or when used as an aid to employing potential cast and crew), and can also serve as an excellent platform for marketing purposes, such as giving the public a curated glimpse of the ongoing production in order to build hype.

Apple iMessage (apple.com)

iMessage is one of the most popular messaging applications used by productions, most likely by virtue of the fact that it is bundled with every Apple device. However, this is also its greatest failing, as you can’t communicate with anyone using a non-Apple device (there’s not even a browser-based version available).

WhatsApp (whatsapp.com)

WhatsApp is the most popular mobile instant messaging app in existence, with close to a billion active users as of 2015. Its main benefit is that your account is tied to your mobile phone number, meaning you don’t need to register or look up contacts you already have in your phone’s contacts list. However, it’s currently lacking in its ability to send large attachments, and its general lack of encryption of messages will likely rule it out from security-conscious productions.

Telegram (telegram.org)

Telegram is probably the best candidate for instant messaging for any size production. Not only is it free, but it has security features that put everything else to shame (including the ability to have messages self-destruct), whilst still having all the features and ease of access of every other instant messaging client, and then adds the ability to attach files of unlimited size and a set of comprehensive APIs.

Voxer (voxer.com)

At its most simple, Voxer allows you to use your mobile device (or Windows client or browser) as a “push-to-talk” communicator, in the same way as a walkie-talkie. It has a number of benefits over a regular walkie-talkie, such as asynchronous messaging—meaning you can listen to a message later as well as live, and then have all the benefits that you’d expect from a text-based messaging application, such as message archiving and forwarding. It’s possible to send audio messages to up to 500 people at once, making it a tempting low-cost replacement for the traditional walkie-talkies in frequent use during shoots, aside from the fact that it requires an Internet connection to function.

FaceTime (apple.com)

As with iMessage, FaceTime is a reasonably popular video conferencing application due to being available across most Apple devices. However, its limited feature set (and its hardware requirements) mean that it is quickly outgrown.

Skype (skype.com)

Probably the most common video calling system around, Skype has a cross-platform, comprehensive feature set but is hampered by poor security features and advertisements (unless you maintain a line of credit for making calls to telephones, making it less suitable as a long-term option).

Skype for Business (products.office.com/skype-for-business)

Although it shares superficial functionality with the free version of Skype, Skype for Business is actually based on Microsoft’s former Lync communication system. It has many of the same features as regular Skype (including the ability to connect to people both with Skype and Lync clients) and also adds some extra things like collaborative annotation of presentations and allowing up to 250 participants on a single call, all of whom can act as presenters as needed.

Google Voice (voice.google.com)

Although it doesn’t offer any VoIP options, Google Voice offers a number of features that work in conjunction with a regular telephone. Register for a free Google Voice number, and it will route incoming calls, causing all your phones to ring when you receive a call, as well as emailing you with text messages and transcribed voicemails. Most features are available only to those in the US.

Cisco WebEx (webex.com)

The main selling point of WebEx is its security features. All communication is fully encrypted and meetings themselves can be password-protected, so only attendees with the password may join. The service also offers a shared “meeting space” for each meeting, where attendees can post comments and attach files. The system also allows for control of a participant’s computer to be shared, so someone else can remote control their system. It has clients for Mac, Windows, Linux, and mobile devices. There’s a browser-based client available, but it lacks in functionality compared to the other clients.

GoToMeeting (gotomeeting.com)

GoToMeeting shares a similar feature set with WebEx, although it is lacking in the ability to easily share files during a meeting. There are clients for Mac, Windows, and mobile devices, although the Mac client is noticeably inferior to the Windows one. As with WebEx, there’s a free edition of the client software available, but interestingly you don’t need to actually register an account to use it, and can start a meeting immediately.

BlueJeans Network (bluejeans.com)

BlueJeans offers a slightly different solution to the problem of Cloud-based conference calling. It’s first and foremost a browser-based “bridging” service. The idea is that participants have any of a number of different conference call systems, and the BlueJeans Network allows these to be unified into a single conference call. So one participant might be using a hardware-based conference room, another might be using Skype for Business, and still another just using a browser, but the service allows all of them to communicate seamlessly.

One of the main drawbacks of the system is that it’s reliant to a degree on being able to access the third-party services. Formerly Skype was available as a bridgeable service, but then an update to Skype removed this functionality, which meant any BlueJeans users who relied on Skype had to switch to using the browser version of BlueJeans instead, thus somewhat defeating the purpose of having it. The company also does not publish its pricing plans, so it can be difficult to estimate whether the service actually represents good value for money.

Twitter (twitter.com)

One of the hallmarks of Twitter is its 140-character limit on every message posted. There’s not much to say to its usefulness as a communication system, other than it can be a very effective way to quickly get messages to a large group of people. However, the privacy (or not) of a particular message is determined by a single setting—either all your messages (“tweets”) are made publically available or none of them are. For accounts which enable privacy, the account owner must grant access to other Twitter accounts individually (publically viewable tweets are visible to anyone, whether they have a Twitter account or not).

Google Hangouts (hangouts.google.com)

Google Hangouts provides many of the same features as Skype but works it into a slightly different context. Users create a “Hangout” or virtual room in which to send messages and share files and initiate video or audio conference calls, providing a sense of structure to discussions and topics as opposed to the more ad-hoc nature of Skype communication.

Hangouts also provides a means to schedule live broadcasts (each of which can be made public or announced only to specific groups of people), which are then archived on YouTube afterwards. However, it is not possible to actually prevent anyone else from viewing the broadcast, as anyone with the link can view it, even if it was sent to them by a third-party.

Slack (slack.com)

Slack takes a similar approach to Google Hangouts by letting users create contexts with which to discuss and communicate with each other. Within a given organisation, any number of “channels” can be created that are visible to everyone in the organisation. Private groups can be formed that are hidden from everyone else, and private one-to-one communication is also possible. Within any of these contexts, there’s a robust set of features for sharing information, whether in the form of text, file attachments, or any of a wide number of integrations with third-party services.

The integrations allow other applications and services (such as Box and Twitter) to automatically post notifications to specific channels or groups as needed. What’s particularly interesting about Slack is that the free version, whilst lacking in some of the enterprise-level features (such as greater retention of message history), is actually a solid offering in its own right. Historically Slack’s feature set has been aimed at people within software and information technology sectors, but much of the core functionality is just as applicable to people in other industries, and as of right now the feature set is rich enough to be of value to people collaborating on small productions and feature films.

Sqwiggle (sqwiggle.com)

Sqwiggle takes a different approach, based around the idea of forming a single team of people who are then accessible to each other at all times. Of note is its “presence” feature, a snapshot of each team member that is updated regularly in order to make everyone on the team feel more connected to each other.