Facebook made small waves last July when it rolled out its integrated video chat service less than a week after the launch of Google+. Technically, the service isn’t proprietary — Facebook “Video Calling” (could they have used a more lackluster name?) is powered by Skype and presumably uses Skype’s existing hardware infrastructure. The utility, though, carries out its setup process with barely a mention of the video-conferencing monolith’s name, installing the service’s behind-the-scenes Java applet in a flash, then prompting the user, “Who do you want to call?” One doesn’t even need to create a Skype account. (Indeed, it seems Skype drew the short straw.)

What makes Facebook’s video chat unique? To answer this, one must step into the shoes of Facebook’s software engineers. It is evident that they attempted to address the major pitfalls of established video conferencing services when designing Facebook’s version, playing not only the role of computer programmer, but also sociologist. Think about how you normally use video chat (if you do at all). Do you ever surf the web and check email while engaged in a meaningful video conversation with a family member or friend? I do. How much of your attention is usually devoted to the conversation? Well, I know I rarely give my 100%. Finally, do you ever find yourself staring at the self-preview image instead of the person you’re talking to? Be honest! Does video chat make you self-conscious? The conclusion I draw is that it is simply too easy to multitask or get distracted at a time when one’s mental priority should be given to the conversation at hand. This being said, we can now examine the stand-out features of Facebook’s video chat:

1. Small self-preview window. No, you can’t do your makeup using the preview window of Facebook’s video chat. It’s just too dang tiny! Facebook made the window the size of a thumbnail, large enough to do little more than position your face within the camera frame. You can move it to a different corner, but you can’t resize it. No more self-conscious self-ogling while video chatting.
2. It stays on top. Facebook designed the video chat window so that it hovers above your browser, email, iTunes… everything. It is impossible to drag another window over it — your video chat is always visible.
3. It’s big. You can’t make the window smaller (but you can resize it to full-screen!).
4. It’s simple. There are few controls in the video-chat pane. No volume, no mute, no pause, no text chat… and no “time elapsed” counter. The only controls are a selector for which mic you want to use as the input source, and a button to close the window and end the call.

From the point of view of a technophile, the lack of control over Facebook’s video chat is absolutely maddening. But what Facebook’s engineers did was very clever. They tried to transform something that could all-too-easily become a background activity into one that stayed distinctly in one’s mental and visual foreground. In rolling out its version of video conferencing, Facebook tried, in baby steps, to alter an entrenched social and technological norm.

Problem solved… right? Well, not really.

The incremental changes that Facebook forced onto its video chat platform addressed the symptoms, not the problem. The problem is this: video chat doesn’t work, at least in its current form, and it has never worked. As an intriguing doctoral dissertation by David Tong Nguyen, entitled “Visually Dependent Nonverbal Cues and Video Communication,” asserts, “we have yet to see video conferencing making changes on the scale of those produced by [other] technologies… [indicating] that current video conferencing designs do not quite meet the current needs of the users.”

Nguyen describes at length how current video conferencing solutions fail to effectively transmit nonverbal cues, especially mutual eye contact. Consider how one’s gaze is distorted when using video chat. One stares at the computer screen, obviously, to soak up visual clues from the person on the other end. That person, however, is doing the same thing — staring at the center of the screen, rather than the camera mounted on top of the computer or inside the screen’s upper bezel. Nguyen calls this phenomenon “vertical parallax,” noting that “new users of video conferencing systems may find these distorted nonverbal cues unnatural and disturbing.” Of course, one could stare directly into the camera, but this would make the interaction wholly one-sided, removing the visual clues that the video call was supposed to provide in the first place for the local user. One can extrapolate from this asymmetry in eye contact: the conversation becomes less intimate, mutual trust is undermined, a user can feel “looked down-on” (literally), and even a sense of false disinterest can be propagated through the medium of video chat. How does the local user even know that the person on the other end is staring at their image, rather than something off-screen?

It is reasonable to assume that video chatting isn’t as ubiquitous as it has potential to be, in part, because of this disconnect in nonverbal cues. One simply doesn’t derive the same satisfaction from a lengthy video chat as one can from face-to-face conversation. A video conference is strangely (and perhaps unnecessarily) artificial, and is not gratifying enough to keep users tied to the medium in the same way that so many are to email and SMS (text messaging). Facebook’s video chat solution makes many steps in the right direction, but ultimately attacks the symptoms of today’s inadequate video-chat standards — disinterest and distraction — instead of the problem itself.