My grandparents in Texas just got a Skype account and a webcam and put it all together tonight while my Dad and uncle were visiting. Once we got a couple little kinks ironed out, we had a really nice video chat. Once The Wife wanted to join in from her computer, we moved the conversation to oovoo since Skype doesn’t offer more than two-way video conferencing.

This was the first time I’ve used oovoo for more than one-to-one chatting, and it was pretty good. We had some static bursts on the line, but I think they were from The Wife and I both running sessions from the same IP address. I’m sure there’s something we can do about that internally (maybe some clever port forwarding; Omar, do you have any advice?), but not tonight.

Last night at my gig (which went reasonably well, except for “Jingle Bells,” of all damn things), I played with Qik.com which let me stream video live from my mobile device. That was also totally cool. The only problem there was that, not surprisingly, streaming video just decimated the battery on my phone. Other than that, though, Qik (and especially the Windows mobile client) couldn’t have been any easier to use. That’s a solid three thumbs up! Especially from a couple coworkers I ambushed…