- Image via CrunchBase
Last night I received a nice email from TokBox, the video chat company, about new features just released. A year ago, when I first tried out the platform I was pretty excited.
TokBox is offering a simple to use video chat, that is now embaddable in third party sites. It is also offering the ability to create threaded video conversations, chat, and public messages. And the good thing – it works like a charm.
These features are important to every video site, conference, or event. As we are working now on a major virtual event, I was delighted to see that these guys are still alive, even though they suffered recently and fired half of their engineers.
However, at the current state, I will never use it for business, nor recommend it to my customer.
Their site, though technically works great, is ridden with content that I wouldn’t like to see my customers associated with – from teenagers to pseudo adult content.
Reliable, socially distributed, embeddable video chat solution is defeinetly needed in the industry, especially after Seesmic turned its back to this market and focus on the Micro blogging market. But no one in its right mind will put its content with teenage girls and questionable content.
If TokBox’s business model is video chat UGC, I personally don’t believe in it, but it is just me. But if they want to attract high profile customers, they need to do a clean up, and get more resources to manage the content in their platform, or create a seperate brand and site for these customers.
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5 Comments
Hi Kfir,
Even though I recently left Tokbox, I do know that there are changes planned for public posts (the company realizes that they pose a problem and challenge); I can assure you the issues with the public area will be dealt with.
Damon, thanks – were you a senior manager in TokBox?
Hi Kfir,
Yes, I was a Senior Manager at Tokbox
I actually spent a great deal of time moderating or monitoring public posts, so I was aware of the underlying problems with them. Like any web site offering something public, such as a blog or forum, you are going to have issues where a few people wreck it for the greater community at large (posting bad content, for example; the video aspect makes it more complex than simply text comments).
I would expect some changes soon:)
Hope that it will happen. Or at least they should create another brand for business users.
In such a video chat program,porn is really alive and we cannot turn that down especially most of the internet users nowadays engage in the exciting world of video sex. Those people that really do bad when it comes to message or chat can be report and being banned the account. In that way a specific video chat will be moderated well.