Last night my dear friend Yolynne tested with me this new instant messaging service, Tokbox.com. No, I believe it's not just another IM service since it has these cool features (that actually work well!):
- call service (voice/video)
- video messaging
- conference
And you can actually use it to make video blogs and use it for video chatting in your website/blog!
Tested the video service with Yolynne (she's in Zamboanga and I'm in Manila) and the video was very clear and wasn't lagging and the audio was quite clear. I haven't seen Yolynne in the flesh for about a year now and I was pretty pleased to see her. Oh and Yolynne mentioned that it works perfectly for Linux machines. And then I tested it with Jay, video (me)/audio (him). He was 25 kilometers away from me and we found the service to be pretty stable. I also tried out the video messaging service which I found to be quite easy to use.
I did experience some difficulty navigating around (but maybe that's just me) and loading takes a bit of time. I had to wait a bit and click several times for the pop-up to finally close so I can answer back via chat with Jay. I'm not sure too if my video streams publicly since a link automatically appeared on my YM when I logged-in. I guess I'll just have to explore it better. But the platform looks promising and quite easy to use.
You might also want to try out the video chat on Gmail. Tried it out with my friend based in Dubai and we were just simply quite happy to see each other via the net with stable and clear connection.
