When you were younger, did you envision a future where we communicated with video consoles, instead of telephones?  I sure did.  Of course, I also thought we’d all be driving flying cars by now, too.  While we’ll all be driving flying cars any day now, video conferencing still has a ways to go before everyone uses it.  Skype is great, but requires a computer and the installation of software.  Skype also faces some legal obstacles that call its future into question.  There’s an option, though, which does away with the installation of software, and let’s you have a video conference from within your web browser.  Read on for a look at our experience with Tinychat.

Setup

Tinychat bills itself as a service that delivers "dead simple video conferences without the extraneous ad-ons and inconvenience, making video conferencing an accessible, uncomplicated experience."  Tinychat is easy, presenting you with various step by step selections that you click through to get into your chatroom.  During this quick process, you select a name and topic for your chatroom; learn the link to your chatroom (typically the name you selected, appended to the end of tinychat.coml/); have the option to share the link to your chatroom manually or via Twitter, Facebook, or Myspace; and can control various settings to your chatroom, such as privacy settings and camera and microphone choices.

Once you’ve successfully joined a chatroom, each person in the chatroom will have his or her own camera frame on your screen.  You also can text chat in the chatroom as well.  The image below shows me, talking to myself between my desktop and laptop, and should give you an idea of how the interface looks.  You can also view video full screen.

Quality

Video conferencing in Tinychat is easy, but how is the quality?  As much as I love video conferencing with myself, I did test it with Bobby (the other writer here at 40Tech).  We also tested Skype, so that we’d have a point of comparison.  The Tinychat quality couldn’t compare to Skype.  First, Tinychat had lag that wasn’t present in Skype.  Bobby and I had to train ourselves to pause before speaking, as the delay caused us to constantly interrupt one another.  Our chat was filled with many instances of one of us saying "no, you go ahead."  This caused our conversation to be very halting, with many stops and starts.

The video in Tinychat was good, so long as there was no motion.  With motion, it became more pixilated than the Skype video.  Otherwise, the video was clear, and very similar to the quality in Skype.  The above screenshot shows a snapshot of video from my Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000.  The audio was comparable to the audio in Skype, and dependent on microphone quality.  Bobby and I each tried Tinychat on two different computers, and the audio varied in quality depending on which computer was used.  A headset is important for voice quality.  Also, without a headset, you’ll be relegated to clicking an onscreen button whenever you want to speak.  This is likely done to minimize ambient background noise.

Conclusion

With some of the shortcomings I experienced with Tinychat, you might think I wouldn’t recommend it.  That’s not necessarily the case.  For any important conference, Tinychat wouldn’t be a viable option.  But for casual chats, or in situations where the other party doesn’t have Skype, Tinychat is a good choice.  Some of the limitations that I experienced make Tinychat annoying at times, but still very usable.  I’ll also be interested to see whether Tinychat works out some of the kinks in the future.  Tinychat works on Windows, Mac and Linux, from within Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Chrome.