Wow, your mom is super-savvy compared to my folks. My mom and dad, bless their hearts, have a lot of trouble with the notion of applications/programs. They don't see applications, they only see things to do. As in:

- Double click (they double click or triple click everything, i.e click till it does something) a certain icon to video chat with us.

- Another icon to send email (a bookmark to gmail)

Even in something like Skype, finding the Chat window (the one you type into) while video chatting is a struggle every time. That skype has a proliferation of tabs and buttons doesn't help, but the idea is that the _vocabulary_ to deal with this sort of thing isn't known to them. I often end up getting frustrated trying to help them do something, and that's when they are already on a video chat with me.

Personally, this sort of thing is very saddening. That I cannot talk to them about the internet (outside of mail and video chat), that they may not fully realize the extent of human accomplishment in the age the live in, is heartbreaking to me. Bad software interfaces are excluding entire generations of human beings from learning about and using technology effectively.