I just had a video chat over 3G and it was the most amazing thing I’ve experienced all day. There was some lag, voice quality wasn’t perfect and video was sometimes jittery. But I loved every minute of it. More »
The Gmail team admits in a blog post that options for video, voice and group chat were “curiously tucked away” in the lower-left corner, so they’ve taken steps to fix it. More »
We dig how easy it is to create one-off, disposable chat rooms with TinyChat, including multi-user video, audio and plain ol’ IRC-style text. Now the site’s offering a way to create chat rooms through your Twitter username. More »
Why do you almost never send handwritten letters to loved ones? The effort — locating pen and paper, writing, addressing and stamping — can seem colossal on any given, always busy, day. But keeping in touch is easier than you (and they) may think. More »
Tinychat is a powerful service that offers a lot of web meet-up power from one link you share with participants. Once they arrive, participants can stream webcam video and audio, display desktop portions, share files and talk in plain old text. More »
Web-based chat application Meebo now lets you video conference with up to five other contacts from any instant messaging service through a team-up with TokBox. As with their regular video chat, you log in, open a chat window, hit the “rocket ship” icon and choose the “Group Video Chat” option. There’s simultaneous text chatting in the same window, and the video quality looks to be about the same as the one-on-one setup. Not too shabby for a free, no-installation service.
600% More TokBox at Meebo.com [via TechCrunch]Integrate video and audio chat with the popular open source chat application Adium using the freeware MeBeam plug-in. Once installed, you can start a video chat by right-clicking a contact and selecting “Initiate MeBeam Videochat”; Adium will automatically create a web-based chatroom and send the URL to your contact (sort of like Meebo is doing). As a bonus, the video chat is completely cross-platform and application independent since it lives in your browser. Unfortunately, the quality of the MeBeam chat was mediocre in my tests, with audio dropping regularly and a much lower resolution picture than you can expect with video chat from the likes of iChat. That said, I’d expect the MeBeam service to continue to improve, so if you’ve been dying for video chat integration with Adium, the free, Mac OS X-only MeBeam plug-in will do the trick.
MeBeam Plugin [via Adium Blog]Popular web-based chat application Meebo has integrated voice and video chat applications directly into the Meebo’s IM window. Just fire up a chat in Meebo, then click the rocket ship icon on the message toolbar. Your window will expand to offer different integrated voice and video chat options, like previously mentioned TokBox. If your buddy isn’t also chatting in Meebo, she’ll get a link to open a Meebo chat and start the voice or video conferencing. We’re not talking the high resolution of Skype, but for a web-based, integrated video chat solution for any IM contacts, it’s pretty impressive.
Rocket Ship [Meebo Blog]
