David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest contains a great explanation of the social challenges of video chat, but in one sentence he nicely sums up the reason video chat will never supplant simple telephone conversations:

Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her.

No doubt there will be many specific tasks (and demographic pockets) where the feature will be very popular, but Wallace’s logic rings true for the greater use case.

(via Kottke)