Remember the optional party line feature available from your telephone company back in the late 80s and early 90s?
One girl from your entire group of friends would have somehow convinced her parents to add party line to their phone, she’d call up a handful of other awkward preteens, and you’d all sit there in silence together, with brief breaks to comment on how cool party line was and how you’d been saving your allowance to buy Use Your Illusion II when it came out.
Was that just me?
Anyway, the latest Windows-only beta version of Skype 5.0 includes group video calling for up to 10 people at a time (the last version had 5-person video calls). Now you’ll be able to SEE everybody sitting around, awkwardly not talking. Or meetings. You could use it for meetings, I guess.
According to Skype’s blog post, “group video calling is currently available as a free trial,” which indicates that once Skype 5.0 is out of beta, you’ll have to pay for it. That, or talk your parents into adding it to your Skype account.
As mentioned, it’s Windows-only at the moment.
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