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Comment by qznc | Hacker News Reader

Why isn't there a Google Hangout clone with WebRTC already? It seems so easy to setup (similar to url shortener or pastebins), but there is no standard site everybody uses (like tinyurl.com before everybody made his own).

edit: Thanks for the suggestions, I appreciate your work. My point is that there is no standard yet. Is it just too early or does Hangout/Skype have some inherent advantage?

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There is https://tokbox.com/opentok/

It's probably the backend used by the forthcoming Mozilla Hello, as the two companies have ties (in Firefox OS).

Looks like it (about:config?filter=loop.CSP)

default-src 'self' about: file: chrome:;

img-src 'self' data: http://www.gravatar.com/ about: file: chrome:;

font-src 'none';

connect-src wss://.tokbox.com https://*.opentok.com https://*.tokbox.com wss://.mozilla.com https://*.mozilla.org wss://*.mozaws.net;

media-src blob:

https://appear.in/

I've been using appear.in for months. That said, WebRTC makes it so easy that videochat/screensharing is basically a commodity now. Someone will have to innovate on top of it to make something better by enough to become standard, and that hasn't happened yet.

You should give http://crowdcast.io a try. It innovates on top of Hangouts.

You should say something about why I would want to try it if you're going to market your product here. I'm not going to request an invite to something I know nothing about other than that it solves a problem I already have a tool for.

Firefox's Hello is an amazing early free alternative.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/hello/

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/01/13/firefox-hello-makes...

A "Google Hangout clone" would, in fact, essentially be a contact management app which dings you when someone wants to talk to you - at the moment, you can use practically any site, they all give you links to share with your friends.

The issue is, of course, getting people to add all their friends into yet another app. You might be able to grab them from Facebook, but then you'll lose all your users as soon as Facebook implements video chat, and you still have to convince everyone to have your app open.

Check out https://github.com/strukturag/spreed-webrtc for an open source WebRTC server.

Try https://room.co

Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers

There is https://talky.io/

That was part of why we built this. Give me a message at icecomm.io@gmail.com - I'd love to help you build one!

Thought of doing a TogetherJS-like feature, too? I'm already using TogetherJS, and icecomm.io and TogetherJS seem to play pretty nice together .. but it'd be nice to have it all in one package, obviously ..

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