Tinychat is a new light-weight chat and video conferencing service making the rounds on the ol’ Twitter bird. Within a few seconds you can launch a chatroom, start broadcasting video and notify your Twitter followers. Awesome.
Where services like Ustream and Stickam can be cumbersome, TinyChat is just simple and effective. However with tiny packaging comes a few big problems. Here is what we love and hate about the service.
Love:
- Easy setup: Just visit Tinychat and you can quickly start your own chat room. You can use the pre-populated TinyChat URL or even customize the link.
- Embeddable: Take your chatroom and embed it on any web page, awesome. This gives publishers a great option to capture some of that chat traffic on their own domain. Pretty boy Pete Cashmore was first to take advantage of this by creating the Mashable Lounge.
- No Fuss Video Broadcasting: If you have a web cam you can start broadcasting without any hassle.
- Multiple Broadcasters: Several people can broadcast at once, during a recent lalawag broadcast we had up to 8 video feeds rolling.
Hate:
- Spammy: I understand leveraging Twitter to drive traffic to a new service, however TinyChat is too aggressive here. They push users to login via their Twitter login and promptly auto-tweet through the users account. The mighty tweet that rings out announces you’ve joined a room and provides a link. It’s helpful to liven up your chat room, but can turn off many users. Also what if you want to get your freaky deaky private chat on, who wants to broadcast that to all their followers?There should definitely be an option to opt-out of this, and better notification TinyChat is going to auto tweet on your behalf.
- Pro Accounts: I bought the pro account because I like to support good web services I enjoy. However it’s pretty clear their premium services are very much half baked. In my experience our Pro features weren’t activated for days, and even now barely work. I wouldn’t push a premium service until it’s truly ready for prime time.
- Operator!: The platform needs a lot of improvement for those launching and operating their chat rooms. The ability to bring in external video, better user controls and video archiving is a must here.
In the end I think TinyChat is brilliant, both in theory and execution. It may just have the problem of being a service that does two things very well, live broadcasting to many and private small collaborative meetings. Those are very different applications and user types.
Always willing to give a good website a second chance, we’ve setup a lalawag live page and embedded our TinyChat room. Feel to chat it up there and look for upcoming live broadcasts from lalawag HQ.
