@hientran hit me up following my original post on The Google Apps Value Proposition. He considered my omission of Google Video and video chat in Google Talk big oversights. So I’m back today to bring you those two pieces to the Google Apps puzzle.

Video
I wasn’t totally surprised by the announcement that Google was made that they have discontinued the ability for the general public to upload video to Google Video, what with YouTube and all. I was also not surprised to see that Google is re-focusing Google Video into an Apps application. It’s really quite brilliant. You can share videos with specific people, or with the public. I could go on and tell you how you can use it, or I can just let you watch how Google uses it.

Video Chat
I can totally see why why @hientran says this is a “cherry on top” feature. I’ll just quote him:

Videochat inside gmail has been great for our org, I can see / talk to my team from without needing to fire up skype or ichat

T

However, there are three things that keep this from being a killer feature for me.

• Not everyone in my org, or who I chat with, has a video camera on their computer
• I already have iChat and Skype running
• It’s web only, so even if you run the official Google Talk app on Windows, it still doesn’t work

That said, if you have a video camera, and don’t already use other chat protocols, then this can be an excellent tool for your organization. And because it is Google, you’ll be able to video chat with anybody who also uses a Google-based web chat — Gmail or another Google Apps account.