In a 180º turn from my last post about the new, Apple device iPhone 4, I’d like to highlight one of the most groundbreaking features that I’ve had the extreme pleasure of using twice already.

Video calling has long been available for free to the public. It’s taken many different forms and been a part of countless different services globally. Skype (which I believe is owned by Ebay) is by far the biggest and most popular way to video chat or “call” someone. Now Apple has created a system that could become *the* way video calling over phones interact. FaceTime is being released as an open standard that other companies can (and hopefully will) adopt in their own devices. The mere ease of use should be a big attraction for companies.

It goes like this: make a call, hit a button, chat face to face.

Of course there are two big stops with the service currently:

1. It’s only iPhone 4 to iPhone 4.
2. It’s only over WiFi.

Both of these should change in the near future and I really hope they do. If companies and networks can suck up their pride for a bit and at least try to adopt, we may have a future way of communication that is far more common than it is today.

Last night our family had some friends over where we could try the FaceTime feature for the first time. Today I was able to call Tim Townsend (@timt97), a sales guy at Comcast Spotlight who I used to work with making local ads in Mississippi when I was working part-time with Video Services & Photography (@vdophoto). The quality was impressive and the whole event was a bit surreal. It was far easier and more enjoyable than any Skype chat I’d ever had. The only thing that went awry was that Tim’s FaceTime feature wasn’t enabled by default in the Setting app. Once that was corrected, everything went swimmingly!

To me, this is an exciting time in the communication industry. I cannot wait for more people to adopt this amazing tech.