A friend of mine introduced me to SightSpeed the other day, and I must say I'm impressed! My previous experiences with webcam conversations were "less than optimal" to say the least. Poor image quality, lagging, voice out of sync with video, etc.

With Sightspeed I got excellent video quality (comparable to VHS, which is the best I can do with my camera), the voice was crisp and clear, echo reduction built in, easy set up and easy to call. A small thing, but I was impressed with the speed it connects at. When I double-click a contact it almost instantly connects and rings on the other side.

But don't take my word for it, download a copy and give me a call. Use my personal e-mail to add me as a contact. If you don't have my personal e-mail account, send me an e-mail via the link on the right. It comes in two versions, one free and one with a payment plan that gives you conferencing features. It even comes in a Windows and MacOS version.

I have not tested it properly behind several firewalls so I'm not sure how much effort it is to configure it, but browsing through the support page it looks fairly straight forward.

So far, I've only got one negative comment. They offer a Click-To-Call button that you can put on your webpage, letting visitors go to a web page where they can install an ActiveX control and start a video call with you without downloading or installing a program. This seems like a good idea, and it probably is too, but on the web page my e-mail address is displayed in plain text. This is a Bad Thing™. Displaying an e-mail address in plain text enables spammers to harvest it and I really don't need more spam. Too-bad, the Click-To-Call button would have fitted nicely in on the right here...