Meetings.io - Simple, online meetings | Hacker News Reader

Meetings.io - Simple, online meetings

meetings.io

139 pointsdwynings62 comments

I hate the stock images on the front page. Should these be webcam video streams?

These details are not super important for the version one launch. Very few "normal" people will notice.

They will notice that they look more like photographs than still frames from a webcam chat.

My initial reaction was that they were profile images representing the people involved in the chat. I have a hunch that "normal" people will think the same.

Otherwise, the product looks very interesting, looking forward to having an opportunity to try it out.

Agreed. My initial impression was those photos were static implying that the service was audio chat only. I went looking through the features to see if video chat was possible.

I agree, I actually came back to comment on this.

The issue isn't so much that they're stock images per se - more that they don't give me an idea of what the product actually looks like in use.

I somewhat agree that "normal" folks won't notice - at least they wouldn't specifically mention anything about stock photos (and these don't look terribly "stocky" compared to others). But, overall the trust or incentive to take the next step that needs to be captured in the first 5-15 seconds will be lower. Even if they can't express it, it just wouldn't feel right in their subconscious.

Also, if possible have the photos set up so the person is facing towards the action you want them to take - the get a meeting room button. Anyways, just a tip, I think it looks very clean overall. And, just went to a meeting room and the onboarding is great. I was in a meeting room within 10 seconds - very nice.

Yeah, kind of a turnoff for me, too. Try to find some authentic pics there.

I think what makes it confusing for me is that the link between the pictures isn't hugely clear. If it could be more clear that there's actually a meeting taking place, it could be easier to make the link. ie. have some similar object or other attribute in each that assists the mind in forming a connection.

it's just a start for version 1, day 1, but point taken - happy to place better pics so email us your screenshots at team at meetings.io and we'll put up the best ones :-)

Sorry to hijack the thread, but are you planning on raising the 5 person cap? We are an eight person distributed team, and gotomeeting only allows 6 cameras at a time, so the last two people to the meeting are always getting ignored. I would happily accept a lower quality feed if we could get 10+ people in a single room.

In the mean time, you could try to use http://roomify.tv - we're supporting now up to 9 participants.

We are going to be enabling 10+ participants very soon :)

You're a team, so just use pictures of yourself. Should be possible on day 2 ;)

I get this error when trying to create a meeting (Chrome/Ubuntu). I was never prompted with a Accept/Deny dialog, so I'm guessing the meeting features just don't work on Linux?:

Oops, looks like you clicked Deny.

You need to enable peer assist and your webcam to participate in the meeting.

you may have peer assist blocked for all sites on your flash global settings. - go here and enable for meetings.io http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay...

Does anyone else think that saying, "Best of all, it's free" is not that big of a selling point anymore? At this point, I assume all services worth using have some free version or demo, and maybe a paid premium version, if it's going to cost anything. If something isn't good enough that I'd want to actually use it, I won't use it regardless if it's free or not. If it's worth using, I'll gladly pay a reasonable amount of money, or at least gladly rock the free version until I need to upgrade. As long as it's free enough to see if I want it, that's all that matters to me.

Am I the only one who finds the phrase on the homepage "Hang with co-workers and teams" a little odd?

No.

It should be "Hang out with co-workers and teams", not "Hangout with co-workers and teams".

Beautiful application.

Here's a HN meeting room for those of us who have no one available to test it: http://m1.io/w3. Anyone care to join?

If you click 'Deny' and 'Remember' then you can't try again as the screen is never shown again.

You could check if the settings dialog is shown at all (see https://github.com/cataclysmicrewind/CameraDetection/blob/ma...) and if not then manually open up the (P2P) settings dialog.

nice one - on it :)

The best online meeting tool in my opinion is etherpad.

The meeting starts with a document containing the agenda. Now everybody chats and rewrites the agenda into a protocol of the decisions made. Meeting ends.

Pros: The discussion is usually clearer, because you talk about text. No need to talk about old protocols, which are written afterwards.

Cons: Does not solve the problem that usually nobody feels responsible afterwards.

One thing that can help with responsibility is to do a final pass at the end of the meeting and call out action items, including these near the top of the document.

The problem, I experience, is not that action items are missing. The point is that you must write the name of the responsible person next to each action item. Maybe even her email, so people can nag her. If possible, set deadlines.

However, the problem seems to be an inherently social one. I cannot imagine any etherpad plugin or something to help with this.

I really enjoy this platform so far. My trial of meetings.io lies in stark contrast to the first time I used Skype...or even when I used it yesterday for that matter. The former is actually exciting! You have certainly over delivered on the "Google hangouts without Google" promise.

A couple of thoughts:

After a meeting is finished I'm not automatically redirected to my profile page. In fact, the only way to get back there is to click on your logo at the top of the page, which seems counterintuitive to me. A "Back to my profile" link or an automatic redirect would be helpful.

I noticed when I viewed the meeting attendees I was presented with a "delete meeting" option. Is this something that people actively use? If so I'd say moving it to a more obvious space would be a good idea. If not (I don't think I'd personally feel the need to delete one) I would nix it altogether.

Keep up the great work! I'm amazed this is such a young product.

As I was submitting this your platform popped up a reminder that a meeting was about to start. Little details like that really go a long way.

The continuous stream of new web/video conferencing services acknowledges the desire (and potential) to build a better user-experience in this industry. Unfortunately, most of these new services miss the hardest part about the industry: go-to-market. Webex, GoToMeeting, and others spend millions of dollars a quarter trying to reach all of us and our corporate buyers. That coverage and mindshare makes it really challenging to get meaningful traction in the web conferencing market these days.

There's plenty of competition, so... what's different here?

No login I guess.

Doesn't work for me behind a corporate firewall. This might be a big problem, since the app is mainly targeted for business use.

Does anyone know which ports does it use?

Your firewall needs to allow NAT UDP traversal. Future version will have fallback to TCP/HTTP to pass through corporate firewalls.

This looks really cool. Hopefully we will see this totally reimplemented using WebRTC so it doesn't require Flash. Still, it works quite well.

that's the plan - we have a WebRTC version in the works but it's still very early days.

Being able to dial into a conference instead of just out would be super-useful, especially if, like reserving a URL for a room, you could also reserve a dial-in code. We have a regular morning meeting in my office for which we currently use Google Hangouts, and it's not really practical to keep track of who's traveling or whatever and won't be able to video-conference in.

great idea - we're adding this to the top of our todo list

You should probably auto-populate the Date/Time fields with their existing values since you do that with the Title field already (it's a little confusing otherwise):

http://www.evernote.com/shard/s146/sh/0b9f462b-f1d7-46d8-8f6...

good idea - on it

Google hangouts without the google.

Hmmm... they appear to be using iterative room names. Makes it not particularly difficult to find other chats that are active. Not sure how much I would like people randomly entering my meetings.

Otherwise looks like a pretty slick site.

setting the room to "private" mode will stop people from just droppin in

Beautifully executed. I'm impressed.

I would suggest working on the navbar just a little bit, to have its look not be so readily recognizable as the 'Twitter Bootstrap, yo!' one.

I can't seem to get it to work -- all I can see is myself, after inviting someone sitting next to me. He gets the same thing. And we're both at the same URL.

Any tips?

check that you don't have a firewall blocking UDP connections within your network

What's offered here that MeetingBurner doesn't have?

Everything? AFAIK, MeetingBurner is for webinars/desktop sharing; this is a videoconferencing app, which MeetingBurner doesn't support.

Ugh, RTFM. I skimmed the no signups, no downloads, and basic meeting details, and it all felt strangely familiar.

I like that you noted it's a videoconferencing app. Meetings.io is a good name, but it doesn't really imply video conferencing to me. That's a pretty nit-picky (and subjective) concern though, and I'll likely give it a try.

This is actually pretty awesome. Is it completely P2P? How much server work does it take to keep up a conference?

it is completely p2p - takes very little server work to keep up the conference.

Works well. Audio quality 10 / Video quality 10. I do a fair bit of tele conferencing. The video quality was what impressed me the most.

I like that it's instant and also the ad-hoc nature of it. I think this will appeal to many market segments.

Can't wait to see the web sharing and other collaboration features once they come online.

Please don't astroturf.

This thing rocks.... and I have an Australian high-latency link... way-smooth for a 5 person conference

As for room security - ensure you enable the auth for new entries - then people must have your OK to enter.... secure enuf for my purposes... for free

where do i find this flash player v11? the linked flash player is 10.something. sad panda.

ah, seems to be a mtlion problem.

Edit: and only on safari, chrome works fine.

> Edit: and only on safari, chrome works fine.

Chrome uses its own, internal version of Flash and not the "system" Flash.

Manually installing flash 11 was a very, very bad idea. You may want to warn mtlion users.

this is superb. precisely what's been missing.

this looks great, definitely going to try it

Sweet.. :)

P2P via Flash? Interesting.

Natively supported by Flash Player 10+, it's been out for 2-3 years now if not longer.

are you a yc company?

yup, we're YC

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