Distributed teams in development

I suppose, at some point, an organization becomes large enough where teams of developers are geographically disparate. In my experience, this is never fun. Each team seems to develop a good rapor locally, for obvious reasons, but that doesn't necessarily translate to a strong connection to peers in other cities (or even countries). It's always difficult to spread common knowledge when the level of interaction between teams is low.

There's been some effort to bring people closer together, but these applications or tools are either too "low bandwidth" or don't allow for the kind of communication you really need for things like peer programming and code reviews. I'm referring to tools like MS Live Meeting, which is something I've been personally subjected to. Yes, subjected is the word I mean to use.

I've recently read a blog entry by Grady Booch where he briefly mentions using Skype and Second Life, which sounds interesting. This also appeals because it's available to us Linux folks (at our office, we have a projector connected to a box running Windows, a wireless mic with a polycom, a bridge phone conference thingie, all of which we use solely for team presentations). All bias aside (I have a distinct dislike of Live Meeting), Live Meeting is too slow and is a good representation of low interactivity, low bandwidth distributed tools. Skype (or other VoIP-ish tools) are a bit more natural for realtime conversations, but lack integration with any kind of tools. I'm not entirely sure what Second Life brings to the table; my exposure to it is rather limited.

It should be noted that many, if not all, open source projects are developed by distributed teams. I've been directly involved in a few popular projects such as Gentoo Linux and contributed patches and bug reports to others. In most cases, collaboration tools are critical to these kinds of projects; IRC networks, forums, mailing lists and numerous other bits of infrastructure exist to support this development model. The major thing I've found lacking is integration into the common toolsets of choice, be it vim, emacs, or a full blown workbench like Eclipse.

So why is it that a bunch of developers can't get on the same page about good, distributed, high bandwidth collaborative tools? Better yet, why can't our normal tools support collaboration as a standard part of development? Things like version control systems cover history management, tracking, auditing, and other functions, but they don't help with real time code review and pair programming. Distributed source code editors are interesting, but I'm not sure I've seen one that fits with the tools a personal already uses, as opposed to simply making them use other tools. In an age of modular language workbenches - I'm looking at you Eclipse - this should be something to pursue.