So, there I was, on the phone helping out the friend of some family member set up their new mp3 player to download podcasts from the ABC. 

Me: “Ok, so click on the address bar, and type in www.example.com, and press enter.”
Them: “w w w … ” (etc) 
(silence) 
Me: “So, you’re at the site now? You should see ‘Download Centre’ on your screen.”
Them: “No - I just see my home page”

…Yeah, this was going to take forever.  Rather than keep on with this electronic version of Marco-Polo, I decided to bite the bullet and try out Copilot. 

Copilot is an application that Joel Spolsky’s company Fog Creek made with four interns, over summer. In essence, it’s a stripped down, very simplified version of VNC, with a ‘man in the middle’ server portion to work around any firewalls or NATs in the way.

It really is simple: enter your card details to buy a 24hr pass, download the “helper” application, and then tell the person the invite code.

The thing that took the longest was explaining how to get to the copilot site, and download the “recieve help” application.

The best thing, is that It just works. Through NAT’s and other strange setups too.
As long as that person can talk out to the wider world, there’s a very good chance Copilot will work too.

Another good thing is that you can make the other person pay the cost (USD$5 for a 24hr pass) - after all, they’re the one getting the tech support.

There were, however some changes I’d like to see:

Give an option for “Low Bandwidth” mode.

I was helping someone with a 256/64kbit ADSL connection. Because of the compression Copilot uses (lossless) - it can take quite a while to get screen updates. 

I understand they’re “keeping it simple, stupid”, but I really would love this mode to be present on the Helper’s application. I’d be prepared to accept lower quality, for faster response time.

Sign the executables

Internet Explorer complains that the app isn’t signed by a trusted party when you try to run it. Therefore you have to click Run/OK about 3 times.

Sure, this isn’t a Copilot generated thing, but it means more prompts for the user. I’m not sure though, whether this would be easy to fix.

All in all - I’m very satisfied with my (admittedly limited) usage of Copilot.