I just had a play with Tinychat.com and thought it was worth doing a quick write-up on as I know a few people are interested in video-conferencing and it has just recently added that capability. I’ve seen Tokbox used most often these days, Cameron Reilly has been using it for his G’Day World Live editions and it’s worked pretty well, but Tinychat has a couple of key differences that make it rather interesting.

No sign-up
Firstly, you don’t need to sign-up to use it, it’s simply a matter of hitting “create a room” and you have a dedicated URL to send to people to join the chat. Joining a chat is just as easy, you just give yourself a username and you’re in. You can chat as well as join the video conference simply by hitting “broadcast”.

Better controls
If you set up the chat room, you are able to boot people out of a room if needed. But one of the things I liked is you can mute other speakers, which can make it easier for anyone recording a podcast, for example, to have better control quality. As far as I can see, if you are the one to create the chat room you can’t override other people in the conference by muting them, which would be a handy (and powerful ) feature. As the person who sets up a room you can also make a room private by giving it password access, which is handy if privacy is necessary, if you were using it for a business meeting for example.

Auto recording
Tinychat video conferencing has recording built into it. From what I understand it’s up to the person who set up the room as to whether the conference is recorded or not. I’ve not tested the recording quality, but it’s great to see this built in as a feature.

Desktop sharing
Tinychat has done something a bit different here, that I don’t think exists on any other video sites I can think of (correct me if I’m wrong) by allowing people to share what is on their desktop with people on the chat. This will be a handy feature for people using video conferencing for meetings and the demo I saw of it worked pretty well. The image is a good size and pretty easy to use.

100 people
Dan Blake from Tinychat told me you can have about 100 people in a chat room with about 12 on video. I think any more than 12 would get a bit much, but 100 is a good size for chat.

Embed the chat on your own site
One of the stand out features to Tokbox is that you can embed the chat on your own site or a social network. I haven’t tried this yet, but I think it’s a great feature and something that will make it appealing to podcasters and videocasters doing live shows. And we appear to have a stable of those in Australia 

Tinychat video was originally built with a premium model, but I understand at the moment they are letting people access most of the premium features for free while they build up their user-base. It’s definitely worth having a look at as there aren’t many players in this space yet and Tinychat has an interesting take on video-conferencing. Besides Tokbox I don’t know of any other players in video-conferencing space. In fairness, Tokbox also has a myriad of other  “social” features – sending video mail, profiles and friends – which make it a different service in lots of ways.

Overall, I think Tinychat has got a great interface and is very easy to use. When I was in a video chat there were a couple of bugs with the sound, but as it has only launched today, I’m sure they’ll smooth things out. Best of luck to the Tinychat team.