One of the hardest parts of being out of town is the lack of communication. Yeah, there's email, but it's just not the same. So, on my last trip, Sarah and I bought two headsets, and we were using AOL Instant Messenger's built-in voice chat. The quality was ok, but I knew there had to be something better.
Enter Skype. Skype bills itself as a "peer-to-peer telephony application". Breaking that down, it's a distributed tool for voice-chat over the Internet. This is what the Internet should be doing... and what I've been looking forward to for a long time. There is also a video plugin available, which I'll investigate next.
I'm talking to Sarah right now. This really makes being away a little more tolerable.
Bonus points for anyone who can guess the source of the the title (without googling!)