After testing out google+ hangouts and doing a 2 hour screen share there with CannibalSmith I want to recommend using the hangouts instead of tinychat.
Sharing your screen can be more beneficial than turning your camera on for many reasons - other people can easily see when you are procrastinating (if you are doing work on your computer) and they can scold you immediately. On the other hand when you have your camera on, nobody knows if you are working or just facebooking. relevant post
Sharing your screen however has some obvious disadvantages and it can be more privacy-invading then having your camera on but hey, if you are revealing something personal on your screen then you are probably not working. There are also some cases where screen sharing can be ineffective (for example when your task at hand is to read a book or to do anything not on your computer) but places such as hangouts allow you to easily switch between your camera and screen and provide a ton of other features that can be somewhat useful. In addition to that you can write apps for hangouts which can also be utilized at some point.
As for my ~2 hour screen share with CannibalSmith - it went great, I didn't take a single break in that time nor checked facebook, gmail, skype etc. and I am one of those people that check everything 10+ times an hour.
P.S. I am writing this during a group pomodoro on tinychat because I was too lazy to do it otherwise.
Edit: Of course if there are other applications which we can use that have the option of sharing your screen then that'll probably work well, too.
I'm working with a few other people on setting up a more robust system. I'd like to give it a little time to get that set up before we start switching where we direct the majority of people. I would like the momentum that we've started to keep going and not have it get fragmented.
That said, it would be awesome if you grab people who are game to run experiments with you and run them and report back about feature recommendations based on that.
Before I was very involved in the Less Wrong community, I heard that Eliezer was looking for people to sit with him while he worked, to increase writing productivity. I knew that he was doing important work in the world, and figured that this was the sort of contribution to improving humanity that I would like to make, which was within the set of things that would be easy and enjoyable for me.
So I got a hold of him and offered to come and sit with him, and did that once/week for about a year. As anticipated, it worked marvelously. I found it easy to sit and not talk, just getting my own work done. Eventually I became a beta reader for his "Bayes for Everyone Else" which is really great and helped me in my ability to estimate probabilities a ton. (Eliezer is still perfecting this work and has not yet released it, but you can find the older version here.)
In addition to learning the basics of Bayes from doing this, I also learned how powerful it is to have someone just to sit quietly with you to co-work on a regular schedule.
I’ve experimented with similar things since then, such as making skype dates with a friend to watch informational videos together. This worked for awhile until my friend got busy. I have two other recurring chat dates with friends to do dual n-back together, and those have worked quite well and are still going.
A client of mine, Mqrius, is working on his Master’s thesis and has found that the only way he has been able to overcome his akrasia so far is by co-working with a friend. Unfortunately, his friend does not have as much time to co-work as he’d like, so we decided to spend Mqrius’s counseling session today writing this Less Wrong post to see if we can help him and other people in the community who want to co-work over skype connect, since this will probably be much higher value to him as well as others with similar difficulties than the next best thing we could do with the time.
I encourage anyone who is interested in co-working, watching informational videos together, or any other social productivity experiments that can be done over skype or chat, to coordinate in the comments. For this to work best, I recommend being as specific as possible about the ideal co-working partner for you, in addition to noting if you are open to general co-working.
If you are specific, you are much more likely to succeed in finding a good co-working partner for you. While its possible you might screen someone out, its more likely that you will get the attention of your ideal co-working partner who otherwise would have glossed over your comment.
Here is my specific pitch for Mqrius:
[edit]
An virtual co-working space has been created and is currently live, discussion and link to the room here.