In my Network World Web Applications newsletter last week, you will find a review of a free video-calling and -conferencing system called ooVoo. The word “cool” is incredibly overused on this page (both Keith and I are guilty of the careless, callous abuse of it, and I am unrepentant), but ooVoo definitely qualifies for this adjective.

Anyway, whether you have a video camera or not (you can use any standard USB video camera), I encourage you to try ooVoo out (if you don’t have a camera, you can simply watch).

With ooVoo you can have a one-to-one video call or you can set up a videoconference with as many as five other people. OoVoo also provides text chat, as well as the ability to send a one-minute video message, send and receive files, and send and receive ooVoo contacts or lists of contacts to other users.

OoVoo’s video quality is remarkable, and what is so cool (darn!) is the way ooVoo dynamically manages bandwidth use to make sure you get the best audio and video experience possible given the available connections.

On lower-bandwidth connections, for example, when the gods of communication clamp down and leave you with (as we say in networking) bupkis, ooVoo will restrict communications to audio, and the video from participants will be replaced with static images.

I reckon that ooVoo is a breakthrough solution not only for business but also for the consumer market. Just today I had a virtual cocktail party with three other people, and there’s no doubt that there’s a compelling quality to the “ooVoo experience” that is different from other products.

Because I’ve been playing with ooVoo, I’ve also been playing with a couple of new video cameras, and the quality of these products varies wildly. For example, Creative’s Live! Cam Video IM Pro — what a mouthful! — is pretty cool (blast!).

<aside>To give you the URL for the product, I went to the Creative site and in the search box entered the model number on the back of the camera: VF0230. Creative denied all knowledge of the product’s existence! How ridiculous is that!</aside>

This Creative camera is an egg-shaped unit with good picture quality, fairly easy focusing, auto white balance and exposure, and lots of silly but entertaining real-time video effects (fake falling snow amused me). And it’s very reasonable at $50 or less. It features automatic face-tracking, which is cool (rats!) but a little disorienting, because the tracking can get a little overenthusiastic (that is, lots of zooms and pans), particularly, it appears, when the camera is off-center to your line of sight.