Google Hangouts without the Google: Meetings.io (YC W11) goes live
meetings.io
meetings.io
The one bit of advice I will give you is to choose what you are trying to do. If you want to be a meeting site for teams/business, do that. If you want to be social, do that. Trying to do both will make things extremely difficult and likely alienate both sides.
I've never used it, but have always been fascinated by that feature. I imagine for your case it could have saved reasonable amounts of bandwidth too, so presumably the disadvantages really must be quite major...
But the title is rather telling - do they make a compelling argument why I want Google Hangouts without Google? Do you hate using existing GMail contacts without having to grant complete access to a 3rd party site? Do you often invite people from Facebook or AOL to your business meetings?
Seems they should ditch the "hangout" with coworkers (a la the defunct SocialEyes), and focus on "meetings". But then Google isn't their foe at all - it's Cisco.
Feels a little me too with the "Hangout" and "Telepresence" allusions, but no convincing reason why I should use this product. Will check back in, but it's a tough gig getting people to use browser-based conferencing (so many little hassles both tech and cultural), and corporate is pretty strongly wed to WebEx/TeamViewer/GoToMeeting.
We use Google+ Hangouts for our conference rooms at Google. It works much better than the system we're replacing, but the video quality is not quite as good as the multi-million-dollar Cisco telepresence systems. (Those are basically room-sized screens that have tables in front of them so that when you sit at the table, the people on the other end of the conference look exactly the same size as they do in real life. The effect is quite convincing, even with US-to-India latency. G+ hangouts still seem like a meeting.)
The ability to share your screen to the projector (and attendees) without cables is the best feature, however; something I've not seen anywhere else.
We have ideas for moentization that does not include charging people to user our service.
Ads or harvesting user info or what? Does anyone know where they are going with this?
It was cool to use the website with family and friends since every one was using different services like MSN and yahoo chat. But i had issues with opentok coz it uses Flash p2p which was causing a lot of issues even when it was running on Chrome.
I love the idea and feature set and the site is beautiful, but I won't switch from Google Hangout just yet - the Google Hangout/Video Chat system, while far from perfect, delivers more efficient CPU usage, better video quality, and fewer drop-outs for me than Skype or Flash RTMPT P2P solutions like meetings.io.
I'll certainly keep tuned for future products, though - again, the site is wonderful and the product perfectly targets a pain point for me. Nice work.
Disabling flashblock out of curiosity and entering a name gives me "oops, you clicked deny" and a "start setup again" button that prompts me for my name again. I don't get the option to click "allow", which I guess is a flash thing that's not being prompted for some reason. Edit: Saw the reason in an intervening comment. Okay, I guess.
Of course they are "still" niche. Any browser plugin that isn't installed by default is niche - hell, any configuration change in a browser is niche.
In related news, Javascript is often required for modern web applications.
If using some plugin to disable features of your browser is something you want to do that that is great, and your business. But you shouldn't complain when it disables a feature of your web browser.
If the site just silently fails, I'll often enough assume it's just broken and move on rather than try to debug it.
I'm most likely not the target audience for this product in particular so I don't want to be snarky or anything, I guess I'm mostly surprised that so many web developers and HN submitters still browse with permissive vanilla browser settings.
My point is that you shouldn't be.
I've never heard a compelling argument so to why anyone should change their settings.
(I do have some sympathy for the argument that people should change the default blocking of third-party cookies in Safari to allow them, and in the pre-XP SP3 days changing the defaults in IE was sensible at times, but these are exceptions)
[...]Just visit our front page and create a meeting room and your done. [...]
Minor typo -- "your" should be "you're"
Other than that this is one of the most exciting apps I have seen in a while, simple and elegant.