Say hello to Goober, the next in a long line of applications aimed at becoming the unified communications solution to bridge your highest aspirations for chat, SMS, VoIP and videoconferencing.
A far-flung diaspora of those disenchanted with legacy voice providers has been champing at the bit promised long ago when engineers at Cisco perfected devices for turning voice into 1s and 0s — and Goober offers a promising stab at something close to 21st Century communication’s reach for the Holy Grail.
Close. But no cigar.
Here’s what Goober does great: It gives users an interface to manage a plethora of IM clients — from AIM to ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, Google and QQ — all on a single platform.
Now, this reviewer never had a lot of luck using Adium on the Mac to do all that, but Goober seems pretty well-equipped to handle those cross-platform handshakes — so bully for the new kid.
Goober’s great at unifying Twitter and Facebook feeds into a single interface, too.
Unfortunately, Goober hasn’t yet solved the FB API issue that doomed Threadsy — users still have to authenticate a Facebook connection every time Goober launches. Until somebody lights upon a method for retaining persistent FB connection credentials, this could be a frustration issue for some Goober users.
But there you go. Once logged in and Goober is running, users have an impressive array of opportunities to connect to and be reached by a wide variety of online contacts.
Multiple-contact chat, voice and videoconferencing capabilities alone make Goober worth fiddling about with and getting configured. Need to bring up to six people into a real-time video conference? Goober handles that. For free.
And the quality of those connections is likely to be state of the art — Goober is powered by Global IP Solutions’ best-in-class HD voice transport protocol, a sign that Goober is serious about its long-term commitment to unified IP communications.
Like so many VoIP solutions, however, Goober requires a decent amount of Settings and Utilities modifications to enable its seamless voice and video communication. Once users have proper credentials enabled, Goober promises the ability to receive calls from any mobile phone or landline as well as to make calls to landlines, mobile phones, web-based voice services such as GoogleTalk and Yahoo — and to communicate with other Goober users for free.
How come no cigar?
Enabling the dial-in capability, so a user can be reached on Goober from a landline or cell-phone — that part failed. Proceeding with the required steps initiated a system crash five times in a row — something’s going to have to be reconfigured at a system level to enable that feature.
Goober’s PR blitz touts the service as a Skype-killer, but it has a ways to go before it can legitimately lay claim to Skype’s easy set-up and seamless launch, even if it does offer a better multi-user, cross-platform solution for IP communications.
Goober’s preferences settings offer a great deal of granularity, but that’s a blessing and a curse. Some things many users will want to turn off — such as constant updating of what’s happening in Twitter and Facebook feeds — can take a number of menu click-throughs to access.
At bottom, Goober is a promising step toward enabling a single-interface solution for managing IP communications. It has set-up and configuration complexities that may frustrate users with little patience or experience in deploying client-based communication platforms, but its built-in capabilities do make it a serious potential competitor for the likes of Adium and — one day, possibly — Skype.
Goober is available as a free download and registered users get a Goober ID that allows chat, SMS, voice and video communication — as well as file transfers — for free with other Goober users in over 200 countries worldwide.
