Can’t Afford to Travel? How to Keep Your Family in High-Tech Touch

Photo by Jose Luis Pelaez, Inc./CORBIS

As with so many grandmothers, Kathleen Jepsen was there when her granddaughter, Noor, got her first tooth and took her first steps. She’s seen Noor, in costume, practice her ballet moves, and she’s introduced Noor to her new puppy, Lulu.

But unlike generations of grandmothers before her, she’s done all of this from a distance of nearly 200 miles. Jepsen lives near Annapolis, Md. Noor lives in Wykoff, N.J. They talk to—and see—each other on their home computers with iChat, Apple’s video conferencing software. Like Skype, a similar service, iChat effectively turns your computer into a video phone. “My own mother used to call me and I’d tell her about the kids—rarely would I put them on the phone because it was so expensive,” Jepsen says. “That one Sunday call was all my mom got. When I think about iChat today, she could have seen them daily!”

These days, even a yearly visit can be a real luxury. With the softening economy and fuel prices staying high during the peak summer travel months, many families are finding it harder to cross great distances to share time together. Jepsen says her own kids are “more likely to spend the money on diapers than gas.”

Fortunately, technology is allowing some adventurous families to remain close with their progeny, often despite great distances. When Jepsen was a new parent, the only people communing via videophone were the cartoon Jetson family. But the stuff of popular science fiction decades ago is very real today. Now you can keep tabs on your far-flung progeny through video conferencing and instant messaging, photo-sharing websites and, of course, blogs. Sound complicated and expensive? You’d be surprised.

“It’s so easy,” says Jepsen, a 61-year-old high school testing coordinator. “For older people, it’s the real answer. What more can a grandparent ask for, other than to live across the street?”

Lights, Camera, Interaction!

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a moving image must be practically priceless, especially when it means face-to-face time with your grandkids. With video-conferencing services like iChat or Skype, compatible with any brand of computer, you’re never more than a mouse click away. It might help to think of video conferencing as simply a telephone call retooled for a new century.

“I’m using e-mail just as I might have used snail mail 10 years ago,” says Paul Murphy, 70, a retired marketing executive. “And I’m using Skype just as I might use the phone.” Murphy, who lives in Princeton, N.J., has a grown son in Hong Kong and a daughter in Manhattan. With video-enhanced Skype, all three of them can chat simultaneously.

Skype is a piece of free software that lets you make telephone calls over the Internet. Go to Skype.com and follow step-by-step instructions to install it—and you’re ready to call any other PC that has Skype for free. Calls to landlines and cellphones cost extra. You might need to purchase an inexpensive headset (starting at $15 at almost any electronics retailer) or use your computer’s built-in microphone and speakers to talk to each other.

But where Skype really gets interesting is with free video calls. There are several new Skype competitors coming to market from JahJah, Yahoo Messenger and Lycos. To make a video call, you need a webcam (usually starting at $30) if your computer doesn’t come equipped with one. Again, the Skype website can talk you through the step-by-step setup, or you can enlist a more tech-savvy relative to help. Once it’s done, though, dialing up your relatives is as easy as sending an e-mail message.

For people who have an Apple computer—or are willing to buy one—iChat is an even higher-quality video conferencing software that comes preinstalled on Macintoshes. All you’ll need to do is set up a free instant messaging account with Apple (or at AIM.com), choose a screen name and a password, and you’re done. Once you have a screen name, tell your fellow iChat user. When that person logs on, the name will appear in your “Buddy List.” Click on the name to send an invitation to chat. Once the person accepts, his or her face will pop up on your screen. Your Apple computer comes with a built-in webcam and microphone, so you’ll be visible, too. With both iChat and Skype, you can include multiple people in your call—imagine a three-way video call with family members in multiple locations.

“It sounds like science fiction, only I’m doing it,” says Jepsen. “It’s a real gift.”

Sharing Pics Is a Snap

If video calling isn’t for you, photo sharing sites like Flickr.com (free) or Smugmug.com (subscription required) are an easy way for family to share their daily lives. Once you or your distant loved ones set up an account, your photo albums will live online, where you can view and print them any time. Uploading pictures is as easy as clicking on the photo you want to put online and dragging it with your mouse onto the Flickr or Smugmug page. Poof, the picture’s online and available to share.

Both services give you the option to comment on photos. If you see a snapshot of your granddaughter wearing a particularly fetching tutu, you can type a brief message that says as much under the photograph. Concerned about privacy? You can protect these sites with a password so only the people you invite can see them.

For a yearly fee of $25, you or a family member can even become a “pro” user of Flickr, which will give you more memory for posting photos and allow users to post short videos (up to 90 seconds long) that most digital cameras are capable of shooting. Uploading video is just as easy as uploading photos.

Amanda Mooney, 22, added short videos she took on a recent trip to Austria onto her Flickr page, providing a richer experience for her parents, who had never been to Europe. “They could see the environment of it, something beyond just a postcard,” she says. “With quick little videos, instead of static images of where I was, they got to really be there with me.” She says her aunt, a long time Flickr user, posted her first comment on the European videos.

The Family That Blogs Together …

As a self-described “digital native,” Amanda Mooney also wrote about her European experience on her blog. Blogs, short for “web logs,” are essentially online diaries. And they have proven an invaluable resource for family members to keep tabs on each other’s doings.

Take, for example, Bob Christian’s family. His daughter Aimee lives in Switzerland with her husband Paul, 5-year-old Seth, and 3-year-old Fiona. Christian chats with all of them from his home in Torrington, Conn., as often as possible using Skype, but with a six-hour time difference between them, it can be difficult to find a time to connect.

Fortunately Christian is usually up to speed on their life abroad because he reads their blog, The Swiss Family C. On their website Aimee and Paul detail events familiar to anyone who has raised two small children—bedtime fights, run-of-the-mill illnesses. But for Christian, a 65-year-old retiree, no detail is too banal. “If they don’t put anything up there for a while, you wonder what’s going on and how come.” Blogs aren’t always completely open to the public—people queasy about sharing intimate family details online can lock their blogs behind a password.

If no one in your family has a blog, there’s nothing stopping you from starting your own. Steve Garfield helped his 82-year-old mother, Millie, start her own several years ago. At mymomsblog.blogspot.com, Millie writes about spending her winters in Florida, movies she’s recently seen, and outings with friends. “We are in touch all the time, like I am with my Internet friends,” says Steve, a videographer and video blogger. “To her that’s great—she feels connected to what I’m doing and now she has a circle of bloggers that she reads and who read her. My mom loves that community that’s formed around her blog.”

There are a number of secure websites that easily let you launch a blog for free, and they are very easy to use. But one of the newest and easiest is Posterous.com. Here’s how you create a blog on Posterous: send an e-mail message to post@posterous.com. That’s it, now you have a blog. Blogs are ideal for staying in touch and letting people know what’s on your mind.

 And other services will even let you stay up to date from your mobile phone. Twitter.com is a “microblogging” service that is halfway between instant messaging and a full-fledged blog. Users can post quick notes of 140 characters or less from their desks (as in, Hi grandma—just saw a hat I have to get you for your birthday!) or away from their computers (planting the garden, thinking of you). Another new service, called Loopt, will let you beam your whereabouts to a friend’s phone, where an icon of you is placed on a map for them. You can then follow each other’s travels, swap photos and comments with loved ones and even find fun activities to meet up and do together in the vicinity.

Of course, even if your comfort zone doesn’t extend too far beyond e-mail, there are still some tech tricks you can use to enhance your communication. Try sending a free greeting card. Julius Goodstein, who has grandchildren scattered all over the country, routinely sends animated cards that he designs with the help of Websites like bluemountain.com, 123greetings.com and hallmark.com. He enjoys being able to use the technology to bridge the distance between his relatives.

“The cards are really, really great,” he says. But what he’s really looking forward to is his upcoming 80th birthday party, when “I’ll actually get to be with them.” Because, when all is said and done, no computer could ever replace a hug.

Brian Braiker is a general editor at Newsweek magazine, where he writes frequently about technology and popular culture.