I last sent out the Hack Remote newsletter in March, just before I scrambled for one of the last flights out of San Francisco back to London. It goes without saying that the last few months have been unlike anything any of us have seen before.
A few months ago Andy and I decided to build something to help newly remote teams stay connected in a world of zoom fatigue, facetime burnout, and hangout exhaustion. Too much live video isn’t a good thing: users tend to subconsciously replicate the traditional office meeting when it comes to video conferences. Hence it’s very easy for people to end up on back-to-back, rambling video calls when working from home.
We believe that holding shorter, time-limited conversations is much less likely to cause fatigue and is much more efficient. So we built a live web-based video platform called
Touchbase.team.
Users can easily start a 15 minute live video conversation about a specific topic and invite coworkers by sharing a url. The conversation displays a timer which counts down to zero, at which point the conversation automatically ends. It’s possible to add 5 mins near the end but we find that people do not generally do this (they just talk more quickly). In fact, the average Touchbase conversation is around 7 mins long.