

Ask HN: Feedback on webapp, online meetings for group collaboration - zhyder
http://almostmeet.com?ac=hnbetatester

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thorax
Yepyep, you did it. This is excellent.

I can't find anything that I wouldn't pay for-- this would help out our team
if it turns out we can avoid firewall problems with the video streaming.

Seems like that part would be the most likely to cause issues, right?

I'll try it again when others on my team are awake to give it a shot.

 _Edit_ :

Ok, tried the voice and video-- a bit worse than other services. Kept cutting
out the audio and video. Had to keep re-enabling it myself to get it to work
again.

File uploads worked well there, as did images and drawings. Good stuff, but
the video and audio aren't stable enough to use for a real conference. Usually
it behaves fine with most services I use, but the others kept losing my video
and audio in mid-sentence.

Desktop sharing seemed to work (or so it said) but it's really hard to tell
what part of the screen it is showing as opposed to things like GoToMeeting.

~~~
zhyder
"I can't find anything that I wouldn't pay for". Had to read that a couple of
times coz it sounded too good to be true :).

Most consumer firewalls won't block it, but most corporate ones will.
Eventually we'll implement a server-based fall-back, but that would suck in a
few ways.

Edit: That's really surprising that your voice and video are getting cut up.
It usually either works very well or just doesn't (if it's a firewall issue).
thorax, can you email zhyder AT dabbleboard DOT com?

As for the desktop sharing, we'll be releasing the feature to allow you to
choose which rectangular region to share. But we probably won't have the
ability to select specific applications to share though; limitation of a
browser-based solution.

~~~
tomsaffell
>That's really surprising that your voice and video are getting cut up

It is strange. All the Flash P2P tests I have not had choppiness problems. Are
you using the Speex Codec? What quality setting? I believe RTMPFP prioritizes
low audio latency most highly, to prevent audio chop. Video doesn't get quite
the same priority, being heavier, and less crucial in most scenarios. So video
chop is a little less surprising.

~~~
zhyder
Yep, Speex at high quality, and you're right about RTMFP prioritizing audio.
I'm guessing there was some temporary Internet connectivity issue. Which other
services out there are using RTMFP btw? It seems to be under-utilized so far,
probably because there isn't a commercial server for it out yet. Definitely
sounds like you plan to use it :).

------
zhyder
There're still many rough edges but it's definitely time for HN feedback!
Please check out the 2min tour and try out the service.

We realized that many folks who use Dabbleboard (whiteboard app, also launched
on HN a yr ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=202798>) use it in
combination with Skype and -sometimes- desktop sharing services. So we decided
to build the complete service for online meetings. Unlike WebEx et al which
are more useful for 1->many presentations, the focus here is on
_collaboration_ within small groups.

Would really appreciate any feedback.

------
zhyder
Btw, the service _IS_ live. Click "Meet" to give it a spin. The logs seem to
show everyone's just checking out the video, which is unusual for HNers. No
wonder there aren't any "<feature> is broken" comments.

------
pyroman
It's good that you have a video showing the features, but it could use some
more audio. The silent parts need a voiceover. It looks like there is enough
stuff to talk about to fill up the whole time.

~~~
zhyder
Thanks! Yeah, it's a pretty poorly made video. There're also too many times
where I'm confused what feature I want to show next and I just waste time in
the video. I didn't edit the video because that would make our webcam streams
look jarring.

Definitely intend to make a better one for the outside-HN launch. Will also
need decent copy at that time.

------
davidalln
Maybe it's just me, but it took me a good while to figure out what you guys do
when looking at your homepage. I'd make sure to emphasize that you are a group
remote conferencing application, even if you are still in private beta.

Your slogan "fully save time, money, and the earth" is great, but make sure
that people know what you're doing! Based on that slogan, you could be almost
any company doing almost anything.

So I'd simply work on the marketability of it. Otherwise, the application
looks great!

~~~
zhyder
Thanks. You're right about the lack of marketing; definitely need to write a
lot more copy.

I'm glad you liked the "fully save time, money & the earth" slogan. I'm still
waiting for commenters here to say how much they hate the name of the service
though; that's been all my friends' first reaction :).

------
tomsaffell
Looks nice, but then a screen-cast should - when do we get to play with it?

What technology are you using in the front end? I'm guessing Flash/Flex. Are
you using FP10's P2P technology (Stratus?). What are you using for desktop
sharing?

~~~
zhyder
You can use it now! Click the "Meet" link on the top. Signup isn't even
needed, but helps if you want to build a library of files and drawings.

Yes, using FP10's P2P tech with Stratus, with a Java applet helping for
desktop sharing.

~~~
tomsaffell
Ahhh - I see. I Had a play - looks nice. I'll test it for real next time a
need a meeting. Few things I spotted:

1\. The vertical height is a little over 100% (so I have a vertical scroll
bar, but only for about 20px missing off the bottom)

2\. The desktop sharing plug-in crashed my Flash Player. Chrome recovered, and
the second time it seemed to work, but I didn't get any notification that it
had worked.

3\. I really like the freehand->geometric functionality.

4\. I think the dialog box at the beginning Re. UDP is not a good user
experience.

If you know anything about Adobe's plan for a commercial product to replace
Stratus then I'd love to talk (or even if you just have some guesses, I'd love
to hear them). Email: tango charlie sierra two two zero one at gmail

~~~
zhyder
Thanks. Regarding:

1\. That's intentional, so the user would scroll down past the the logo and
"Signed as ..." portion at the top. But I guess that's not a good design
decision.

2\. Sorry! Need to test more browsers. Opera has issues too btw, but
Safari+Firefox+IE seem to be happy.

4\. Agreed. It turns out it's hard to check when the firewall is really
blocking UDP, so we're having the user check for it. We think we have a
solution for that though, and will release that soon.

No word from Adobe about a commercial version of Stratus or release date for
FMS4 (which is supposed to support the functionality too). Btw, Adobe's Flash
Collaboration Service (formerly "Cocomo") is also a contender for commercial
release.

------
paulbaumgart
Desktop sharing doesn't seem to work on my system (Thinkpad T60 w/ Ubuntu
8.10), and it makes my browser nearly unresponsive, even when it's the only
Firefox tab. (It's a 1.83 GHz/core Centrino Duo w/ 3 GB RAM- what's your
minimum system requirements?)

Also, I wasn't able to get other people to join me using the "invite" link- is
there some sort of port forwarding I need to set up for this to work?

If everything worked, I'd definitely pay a reasonable monthly fee for it. So
far, though, all I can do is scribble on the whiteboard.

(My contact info is linked in my profile.)

~~~
zhyder
Your HW should be more than enough. It could be an issue with the version of
your Java plugin. Do you know if you have at least 1.5?

The invite link should just work; no other setup is needed. Can you email me
the link?

~~~
paulbaumgart
I tried restarting Firefox, and desktop sharing works! I'm using the standard
Java 1.6 plugin that comes with Ubuntu 8.10- anyway, glad it works now. We can
continue this conversation via email.

Edit: Eh, it ended up making Firefox pretty unresponsive in the end, but I did
see a screenshot of my desktop for a while, at least. :-)

~~~
zhyder
Man I really hate Java applets.

------
zhyder
P.S. we're looking for a salesperson or general 'business guy'.
<http://www.dabbleboard.com/join> has a somewhat generic description. Willing
to consider arrangements ranging from market-level salary to cofounder levels
of equity; ideally something in the middle.

------
quizbiz
I think it would be wise to proudly feature a nice privacy policy.

------
bobbyi
How is this different from dimdim?

~~~
zhyder
Dimdim, like WebEx, seems to be optimized for presentations. For instance,
they only allow 1 or 2 people to share their webcams (I think they even pitch
the 2 webcams as "2 people can present together...").

AlmostMeet is more for those intense collaborative discussions within a small
group. So everyone's an equal participant, even with the webcam and desktop
sharing. And then there's a whiteboard that's actually usable.

Because we use P2P, the voice chat should also be better. The caveat with P2P
is that it can't scale to a large number of participants, which is okay, coz
neither does our interface :).

