

Google Hangouts without the Google: Meetings.io (YC W11) goes live - denismars
http://meetings.io

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DanBlake
Some competition for us, I like it! You will soon find the major disadvantages
of using flash p2p. We completely abandoned using p2p for tinychat.com as it
caused way more issues than it solved.

The one bit of advice I will give you is to choose what you are trying to do.
If you want to be a meeting site for teams/business, do that. If you want to
be social, do that. Trying to do both will make things extremely difficult and
likely alienate both sides.

~~~
nl
Can you talk some more about the problems with P2P in flash?

I've never used it, but have always been fascinated by that feature. I imagine
for your case it could have saved reasonable amounts of bandwidth too, so
presumably the disadvantages really must be quite major...

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cdrxndr
Nice, quality imagery on the demo pages. And looks like they have a pretty
full feature set already available.

But the title is rather telling - do they make a compelling argument why I
want Google Hangouts without Google? Do you hate using existing GMail contacts
without having to grant complete access to a 3rd party site? Do you often
invite people from Facebook or _AOL_ to your business meetings?

Seems they should ditch the "hangout" with coworkers (a la the defunct
SocialEyes), and focus on "meetings". But then Google isn't their foe at all -
it's Cisco.

Feels a little me too with the "Hangout" and "Telepresence" allusions, but no
convincing reason why I should use this product. Will check back in, but it's
a tough gig getting people to use browser-based conferencing (so many little
hassles both tech and cultural), and corporate is pretty strongly wed to
WebEx/TeamViewer/GoToMeeting.

~~~
jrockway
_Will check back in, but it's a tough gig getting people to use browser-based
conferencing_

We use Google+ Hangouts for our conference rooms at Google. It works much
better than the system we're replacing, but the video quality is not quite as
good as the multi-million-dollar Cisco telepresence systems. (Those are
basically room-sized screens that have tables in front of them so that when
you sit at the table, the people on the other end of the conference look
exactly the same size as they do in real life. The effect is quite convincing,
even with US-to-India latency. G+ hangouts still seem like a meeting.)

The ability to share your screen to the projector (and attendees) without
cables is the best feature, however; something I've not seen anywhere else.

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jdludlow
_How do you make money if it's completely free?

We have ideas for moentization that does not include charging people to user
our service._

Ads or harvesting user info or what? Does anyone know where they are going
with this?

~~~
denismars
We have something that we're going to release in the coming months that will
answer this question. And it does not include Ads, harvesting user info or
charging users to use our service. It's something completely new and exciting.

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feras
Good idea. I did a similar website in a weekend using opentok API :
<http://bit.ly/IScw8F> .

It was cool to use the website with family and friends since every one was
using different services like MSN and yahoo chat. But i had issues with
opentok coz it uses Flash p2p which was causing a lot of issues even when it
was running on Chrome.

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bri3d
I think group video is one of the interesting places in the mainstream Web
where pure technical chops can still win over usability, elegance, and
featureset. Hence, I think it's going to be hard to compete with Google (who
are still very strong technically) here.

I love the idea and feature set and the site is beautiful, but I won't switch
from Google Hangout just yet - the Google Hangout/Video Chat system, while far
from perfect, delivers more efficient CPU usage, better video quality, and
fewer drop-outs for me than Skype or Flash RTMPT P2P solutions like
meetings.io.

I'll certainly keep tuned for future products, though - again, the site is
wonderful and the product perfectly targets a pain point for me. Nice work.

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vlokshin
<http://meetings.io/features>

[...]Just visit our front page and create a meeting room and your done. [...]

Minor typo -- "your" should be "you're"

~~~
denismars
fixed - thanks for the heads up :)

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dgcliff
This just flat out doesn't work in my browser (Chromium). I even disabled the
adblocker to see if that helped. It's telling me I chose "Deny" when I was
never given an option. A pop up that doesn't work?

~~~
denismars
For some reason linux machines have their global flash setting with peer
assist defaulted to "deny" on all sites. To fix this go here
[http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay...](http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager09.html)
and enable peer assist for meetings.io. This should solve it.

~~~
ben0x539
That flash applet showed "Always ask" for "oi.meetins.io". I changed it to
"Always allow" but it does not seem to make a difference.

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tlack
It tells me I need to update to Flash Player 11, but the Adobe site tells me
I'm using Chrome and that will keep Flash updated on its own. Frustrating! I'm
using Chrome 14.0.835.186 on Windows 7.

~~~
tawhaki
Chrome 14 is a really old version. The current stable version is 18. Try to
upgrade it.

~~~
cpeterso
I thought Chrome's silent updates were supposed to keep everyone running the
latest release?

~~~
nl
They are. Seeing someone on Chrome 14 is very unusual - it doesn't even show
up on [http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-
monthly-201103...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-
monthly-201103-201203)

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ben0x539
Doesn't work with flashblock, stuck in a "Loading" loop. Are noscript and
flashblock still that niche that they aren't being tested against for the core
feature of a web product?

Disabling flashblock out of curiosity and entering a name gives me "oops, you
clicked deny" and a "start setup again" button that prompts me for my name
again. I don't get the option to click "allow", which I guess is a flash thing
that's not being prompted for some reason. Edit: Saw the reason in an
intervening comment. Okay, I guess.

~~~
nl
_Are noscript and flashblock still that niche that they aren't being tested
against for the core feature of a web product?_

Of course they are "still" niche. _Any_ browser plugin that isn't installed by
default is niche - hell, any _configuration change_ in a browser is niche.

In related news, Javascript is often required for modern web applications.

If using some plugin to disable features of your browser is something you want
to do that that is great, and your business. But you shouldn't complain when
it _disables a feature of your web browser_.

~~~
ben0x539
Graceful degradation has been a thing for a while and of the minority of
websites that actually require javascript for their main use rather than for
some flashy UI enhancements or advertisements, plenty remember to go "you need
javascript for this site". And you pretty much have to do sneaky things with a
flash object to begin with to hide the really obvious button to enable it that
flashblock substitutes.

If the site just silently fails, I'll often enough assume it's just broken and
move on rather than try to debug it.

I'm most likely not the target audience for this product in particular so I
don't want to be snarky or anything, I guess I'm mostly surprised that so many
web developers and HN submitters still browse with permissive vanilla browser
settings.

~~~
nl
_I guess I'm mostly surprised that so many web developers and HN submitters
still browse with permissive vanilla browser settings._

My point is that you shouldn't be.

I've never heard a compelling argument so to why anyone should change their
settings.

(I do have some sympathy for the argument that people should change the
default blocking of third-party cookies in Safari to allow them, and in the
pre-XP SP3 days changing the defaults in IE was sensible at times, but these
are exceptions)

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gsharma
Design looks great, but can't get the meeting working. It is stuck on that
flash permission dialog. Neither allow or deny work. I am using Chrome 18 on
OS X Lion.

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thomaspun
Impressive! Congrats on the launch, Denis! You may want to consider putting a
"share your experience" call to action (like EXEC) if the meeting was long or
how we can improve if the call was short. I was really impressed and wanted to
share at the end of meeting page but didn't see anything there.

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samirahmed
One note: The summary email after ending a session gives me times in PT. I
assume meetings.io knows my location (if they know my weather) so it would be
better if it use my local time.

Other than that this is one of the most exciting apps I have seen in a while,
simple and elegant.

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carb
Great execution, but I wish that websites would stop using the same stale
layout. It almost made me not try the app just because it feels like zero
effort went in to the presentation of the webpage.

~~~
untog
I think this is just a case of MVP-itis. They can make their page more
distinctive later.

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7952
Love it. It is a little easy to guess the URL of other peoples meetings.

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rogerjin
The product looks great. I'm personally curious about their product roadmap
with regards to where they plan to expand on beyond video meetings in the long
run. Good luck guys!

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tejaswiy
Awesome! Would be great if it had an API and let us include the service in our
apps. Although .. not exactly sure how that would work.

~~~
zgohr
Note I am not affiliated. See: <http://www.tokbox.com/opentok/api>

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jakubw
I like how it displays the weather in each participant's location, now I can
shorten the usual opening chit chat to a minimum.

~~~
jambo
This is nice if you already know someone & have a rapport, but if that's the
case, you can often skip it any way. Though distasteful to some hackers, small
talk has a valuable function, and I wouldn't design a feature in a social
application that would prevent it. Though in this case, you'll probably just
get people switching from "what's the weather like, Bob?" to "How bout that
weather, Bob."

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dodoflying
It seems many functions are not implemented yet. I'll like to see if there is
a white board to let users freely draw anything.

~~~
joshmlewis
Or an iPad app that let's you connect to a meeting room and draw on a
whiteboard with a stylus. :)

~~~
denismars
We're currently working on the iPad app and should have it out in the coming
months. Whiteboard within the app would be really cool :)

~~~
senko
Just embed <http://awwapp.com/> (shameless plug here, but let me know if you'd
be interested :)

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gte910h
What video codec is that? Man it looks nice.

~~~
denismars
h264 vid with speex audio

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semerda
Used it few times today. Simple, fast & easy to use. So far it's awesome! Well
done Denis & Arend.

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rdl
Looks cool -- do you do Fun NAT Tricks to be peer to peer through firewalls?

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vr000m
do you use Websockets? and the new WebRTC? The jobs section does allude to
webrtc but there is also a lot of AIR/Flash related stuff (AFAIK webrtc
doesn't use RTMFP for transport).

~~~
denismars
Currently using RTMFP via flash to make p2p work on all browsers and os. We're
working on a WebRTC implementation but its still very early days.

~~~
vr000m
Yes, it is certainly early days for webrtc. It is scheduled to ship by the end
of the year (at least from the standards perspective).

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hansef
Nice! What are you guys using for encoding and transport?

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meapix
it doesn't work in chrome in linux.

