I think fog is a great metaphor for the communication disparities in a remote work environment.
That said, I don't think screenhero is the answer.
I telecommute, and here's a story that I believe is a much better solution than screensharing (how often in a real meeting do we grab each others spreadsheets or open docs?):
I was working on a project with a PM and he wanted to just sit on a call and work through a handful of smaller bugs to prioritize work and maybe knock some things out quickly. We ended up sitting on a Skype call for 3 hours working through things. That's a fair chunk of my day. Do you know what it was? Awesome! As long as both parties don't feel compelled to say something, you can just leave that channel open and it's surprisingly similar to sharing an office.
So here's my proposed solution, but it's not really in my domain to create it:
Spatial VoiP. Everyone in the company dials in each morning and sits online while they're working. Of course, you can drop out, or you could set yourself to busy. But the crux of it is this, instead of a list of callers, you could lay out a digital office complete with walls and doors where you can sequester yourself or a handful of employees for a meeting. And the volume of a person would be relative to how close you are to them in the "digital" office (I know, I know, Skype's volume management wouldn't suffice for this project).
Again, the technical aspects are beyond my abilities, but I imagine you could let the lines run really cold while there isn't a lot of communication so you're not chewing up bandwidth. If you're closed in an office, it could really just close your VoiP connection and poll the server as to the state of your door and dial you back in when it opens.
I sure will. I actually didn't mean to be so dismissive in original post. ScreenHero seems like it was designed to solve a different problem than something like Sococo, and I can't imagine trying to pair-program when your screens are separated ;)
I'd use Ventrilo, you have rooms and you can mute or change the volume of people separately, if you're admin you can drag people to rooms, there's no video in it tho.
That said, I don't think screenhero is the answer.
I telecommute, and here's a story that I believe is a much better solution than screensharing (how often in a real meeting do we grab each others spreadsheets or open docs?):
I was working on a project with a PM and he wanted to just sit on a call and work through a handful of smaller bugs to prioritize work and maybe knock some things out quickly. We ended up sitting on a Skype call for 3 hours working through things. That's a fair chunk of my day. Do you know what it was? Awesome! As long as both parties don't feel compelled to say something, you can just leave that channel open and it's surprisingly similar to sharing an office.
So here's my proposed solution, but it's not really in my domain to create it:
Spatial VoiP. Everyone in the company dials in each morning and sits online while they're working. Of course, you can drop out, or you could set yourself to busy. But the crux of it is this, instead of a list of callers, you could lay out a digital office complete with walls and doors where you can sequester yourself or a handful of employees for a meeting. And the volume of a person would be relative to how close you are to them in the "digital" office (I know, I know, Skype's volume management wouldn't suffice for this project).
Again, the technical aspects are beyond my abilities, but I imagine you could let the lines run really cold while there isn't a lot of communication so you're not chewing up bandwidth. If you're closed in an office, it could really just close your VoiP connection and poll the server as to the state of your door and dial you back in when it opens.
Anyway, that's a start.