Posted on Tuesday 30th of October 2007 at 16:09 in Reviews

Review: MeBeam.com - free instant video conferencing

This is another review from my recent $130 of advertising for only $30 offer and this time we're looking at MeBeam.com - an instant video conferencing application.

MeBeam is a website that operates entirely online. The logic is that you visit the site and enter the name of a room (if it doesn't exist, it is created for you). Then you tell your friends the name of the room; they enter that on the site homepage and you all end up in the same room.

The real bonus of this approach is that you don't need any specific applications installed on your machine to use it - you just need a microphone, webcam and speakers (although these aren't strictly necessary, it does seem silly to use the site without them). Ironically enough that is exactly what I did, so I could get a feel of what the appliation does.

Visiting the lobby was "an experience"
Well, the Internet has not failed to disappoint once more. Given a lobby with several people using webcams it was only normal to see 'adult' material on a few of them. The below screenshot exemplifies the situation nicely:



The chap on the left was stroking himself on camera, and the person on the right had opted to showing hardcore, man-on-man pornography for all to see (which I've blacked out for the easily offended). However, the users who were behaving "normally" showed the system to work quite well in all honesty. The audio was a bit fudged in places but that could be the fault of the user who had cheap equipment. The streaming was quite fast and seemed reliable enough.

What's more to say? It worked quite well and has a nice application. Although one thing concerns me...

Fierce competition
I couldn't help but feel that Skype have a very similar service using a downloaded application that is a lot sexier than this. MSN has video-chat too... so there is some serious competition. The only real merit I can hand MeBeam is that it's entirely online and needs nothing more than the right equipment and a browser - but once you've got all the equipment isn't it worthwhile registering for a Skype account anyway?

It's a nice idea and developed quite well, but once more it has fallen victim to pornographic mis-use (such was the style at the time). The site could do with a re-branding but the fundamentals are actually rather good - I don't like the interface or design but I think the "nitty-gritty" works quite well - and I'm a critical user. I think if some money was splashed on a redesign, some rebranding and some marketing then MeBeam could be a really good system. Check it out at MeBeam.com.

 

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