TokBox Becomes the Online Party Line

Yesterday afternoon, I was calling my friend Jesse Thomas when his girlfriend picked up and invited me to an online video chatroom called TokBox. I had used the service earlier on with Peter Corbett but now there were four of us chatting randomly about pretty much nothing. I decided to tweet out to my friends to come join the party and see how many people we could get to come join. Within 10 minutes we had close to 20 people chatting simultaneously in a TokBox conference room.

The conference became some sort of post-modern art display with people saying random things and pointing in random directions reminding me of the introduction to the Brady Bunch television show. While a 20 person conference call is not extremely useful for productivity purposes it was a pretty cool display of a new and unique technology. Unfortunately, I had to get on a business call during the TokBox session and while I thought my microphone had been turned down, it hadn’t!

Regardless, of my inability to properly manage the hardware attachments to my computer, my first TokBox experience was a pretty good one. TokBox provides a simple solution for those that are looking to engage in video conferencing for free. The only thing lacking currently lacking is a group chat feature within the conference area but I would expect that to be added relatively soon. Additionally, there were a number of people that had technical issues with TokBox. I was not one of them.

Image courtesy of Peter Corbett

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