Yesterday I did something that made me think I was living in “the future”. You know, that nebulous time/place that we all thought of as kids. I mentioned it briefly on Twitter, not that there’s really any other kind of twitter mention, but I’ll expand here. That thing was to make a FaceTime call to my brother.

Video calls are nothing new. I’ve used Skype before and there have been plenty of phones with front facing cameras and video calling capabilities. What’s new about FaceTime is how easy it is. I opened my contacts list on my iPhone, picked my brother’s contact details and hit the FaceTime button. We spoke for a bit, he showed me what the weather was like in Dublin and I showed him what it was like in Roseville.

Like I’ve said many times before about many different things, Apple wasn’t the first to do this, but they did it right. It felt normal to make calls this way. Before this, video calls were cumbersome. Both parties needed to be signed onto the same service and in front of whatever device they were using. I guess this is still true to an extent, but the device is a phone rather than a computer and the service is built-in and doesn’t require a conscious effort to connect a client to it. This removes the effort needed to make video calls, which will result in more people doing it. Furthermore, the protocol will be available to others who want to offer their own solutions.

So there we go. Video calling has just started to hit the mainstream. Next up, flying cars, food pills and teleporting.