Android Candy: the Verbification of Video Chat

People who study the history of languages probably will look back at our current time and scratch their heads. We keep inventing verbs! First, Google became the verb we use for searching. Then, "Facebooking" someone became a viable way to contact them. Heck, I forgot about "texting" someone. It seems we just keep taking perfectly good nouns and making them verbs. We keep verbing all our nouns! But I digress.

Unfortunately, I've noticed a trend where people who want to do video chat are starting to say, "Facetime me." The problem isn't with the terminology, it's with the proprietary technology. If you're an Android user, you can't "Facetime" someone. Google Hangouts sort of solves that problem, but it's not as user-friendly as Facetime on iOS is.

Google hopes to change that with its new Duo app. It's designed very much like Facetime, but it has native iOS and Android apps. In my trials, the video quality is fine, so it's really only adoption that needs to happen in order to become the standard across platforms. It's worth a try, but you'll have to convince your Apple friends to install a new app for video chatting. Also, "duo" doesn't really lend itself to verbification, so I'm a little worried Google has a non-starter on that note alone!

Shawn is Associate Editor here at Linux Journal, and has been around Linux since the beginning. He has a passion for open source, and he loves to teach. He also drinks too much coffee, which often shows in his writing.

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