They will notice that they look more like photographs than still frames from a webcam chat.
My initial reaction was that they were profile images representing the people involved in the chat. I have a hunch that "normal" people will think the same.
Otherwise, the product looks very interesting, looking forward to having an opportunity to try it out.
Agreed. My initial impression was those photos were static implying that the service was audio chat only. I went looking through the features to see if video chat was possible.
I somewhat agree that "normal" folks won't notice - at least they wouldn't specifically mention anything about stock photos (and these don't look terribly "stocky" compared to others). But, overall the trust or incentive to take the next step that needs to be captured in the first 5-15 seconds will be lower. Even if they can't express it, it just wouldn't feel right in their subconscious.
Also, if possible have the photos set up so the person is facing towards the action you want them to take - the get a meeting room button. Anyways, just a tip, I think it looks very clean overall. And, just went to a meeting room and the onboarding is great. I was in a meeting room within 10 seconds - very nice.
I think what makes it confusing for me is that the link between the pictures isn't hugely clear. If it could be more clear that there's actually a meeting taking place, it could be easier to make the link. ie. have some similar object or other attribute in each that assists the mind in forming a connection.
it's just a start for version 1, day 1, but point taken - happy to place better pics so email us your screenshots at team at meetings.io and we'll put up the best ones :-)
Sorry to hijack the thread, but are you planning on raising the 5 person cap? We are an eight person distributed team, and gotomeeting only allows 6 cameras at a time, so the last two people to the meeting are always getting ignored. I would happily accept a lower quality feed if we could get 10+ people in a single room.
I get this error when trying to create a meeting (Chrome/Ubuntu). I was never prompted with a Accept/Deny dialog, so I'm guessing the meeting features just don't work on Linux?:
Oops, looks like you clicked Deny.
You need to enable peer assist and your webcam to
participate in the meeting.
Does anyone else think that saying, "Best of all, it's free" is not that big of a selling point anymore? At this point, I assume all services worth using have some free version or demo, and maybe a paid premium version, if it's going to cost anything. If something isn't good enough that I'd want to actually use it, I won't use it regardless if it's free or not. If it's worth using, I'll gladly pay a reasonable amount of money, or at least gladly rock the free version until I need to upgrade. As long as it's free enough to see if I want it, that's all that matters to me.
The best online meeting tool in my opinion is etherpad.
The meeting starts with a document containing the agenda.
Now everybody chats and rewrites the agenda into a protocol of the decisions made.
Meeting ends.
Pros: The discussion is usually clearer, because you talk about text. No need to talk about old protocols, which are written afterwards.
Cons: Does not solve the problem that usually nobody feels responsible afterwards.
One thing that can help with responsibility is to do a final pass at the end of the meeting and call out action items, including these near the top of the document.
The problem, I experience, is not that action items are missing. The point is that you must write the name of the responsible person next to each action item. Maybe even her email, so people can nag her. If possible, set deadlines.
However, the problem seems to be an inherently social one. I cannot imagine any etherpad plugin or something to help with this.
I really enjoy this platform so far. My trial of meetings.io lies in stark contrast to the first time I used Skype...or even when I used it yesterday for that matter. The former is actually exciting! You have certainly over delivered on the "Google hangouts without Google" promise.
A couple of thoughts:
After a meeting is finished I'm not automatically redirected to my profile page. In fact, the only way to get back there is to click on your logo at the top of the page, which seems counterintuitive to me. A "Back to my profile" link or an automatic redirect would be helpful.
I noticed when I viewed the meeting attendees I was presented with a "delete meeting" option. Is this something that people actively use? If so I'd say moving it to a more obvious space would be a good idea. If not (I don't think I'd personally feel the need to delete one) I would nix it altogether.
Keep up the great work! I'm amazed this is such a young product.
The continuous stream of new web/video conferencing services acknowledges the desire (and potential) to build a better user-experience in this industry. Unfortunately, most of these new services miss the hardest part about the industry: go-to-market. Webex, GoToMeeting, and others spend millions of dollars a quarter trying to reach all of us and our corporate buyers. That coverage and mindshare makes it really challenging to get meaningful traction in the web conferencing market these days.
Being able to dial into a conference instead of just out would be super-useful, especially if, like reserving a URL for a room, you could also reserve a dial-in code. We have a regular morning meeting in my office for which we currently use Google Hangouts, and it's not really practical to keep track of who's traveling or whatever and won't be able to video-conference in.
You should probably auto-populate the Date/Time fields with their existing values since you do that with the Title field already (it's a little confusing otherwise):
Hmmm... they appear to be using iterative room names. Makes it not particularly difficult to find other chats that are active. Not sure how much I would like people randomly entering my meetings.
I can't seem to get it to work -- all I can see is myself, after inviting someone sitting next to me. He gets the same thing. And we're both at the same URL.
Ugh, RTFM. I skimmed the no signups, no downloads, and basic meeting details, and it all felt strangely familiar.
I like that you noted it's a videoconferencing app. Meetings.io is a good name, but it doesn't really imply video conferencing to me. That's a pretty nit-picky (and subjective) concern though, and I'll likely give it a try.
