Wengo Video Chat for Bloggers
Nick Gonzalez
23 comments »
Wengo, a subsidiary of 9 Telecom, France’s second largest telecom, has a well designed chat widget for bloggers. It’s called Wengo Visio and is like MeeboMe but with video chat. Visio runs in Flash through a bit of embedded JavaScript and CSS, with SIP as the communications protocol. Check here for some bloggers that have it implemented.
When you have your widget installed, you can make yourself available to chat by logging in through an admin menu. While online, readers can solicit you for chatting by typing a little message in text box that shows up on the owners side. The owner can then initiate the chat if they choose. Chatting is currently one-to-one via mic and optional web cam, which makes it less overwhelming than the flood of texting that can happen with MeeboMe. Although, the group video chat of PalTalk and ability for readers to listen in could make for an ad hoc “Gillmor Gang” style meeting of the minds right on your blog.
But Wengo Visio isn’t intended to be a standalone program, rather it is an effort to expose Wengo’s other products, Wengo Talents community and Wego Phone to a wider audience. Wengo Phone is their own chat client that lets you text chat, call other VOIM users, call landlines, call cell phones, set up audio conferences, and make video calls. It also runs on Win, Mac, and Linux, with Google Talk, Yahoo, ICQ, and GAIM compatability. Similar to Skype-out, they only charge for calls to landlines and cell phones, but have a free trial with € 0.50 of credits until January 4th. So far, over 72 million minutes have been shared over Wengo.
Stepping back a step further, both Wengo Visio and Wengo Phone are part of their long term plan of building a pay-per-call expert network, Wengo, where people can sell their time on the phone via PayPal or credit card. This may sound a lot like Ether, sans the 1-800 number, and it is very similar. Wengo, however, has opted to build their offering around their own Wengo community site, where users have categorized themselves, received ratings, and posted profiles. Ether has opted for a different strategy by relying on users to promote services on their own.
I’m impressed that it is cross platform and supports other consumer-based IM clients. Are the text chats send in cleartext or is there some form of data encryption?
http://davidchao.typepad.com
They need to get a better designer to do their branding..
The video engagement model is pretty neat, however this one is pretty limited.
Another aspect of engagement could be video social bookmarking, something like Vidli (www.vidli.com) is trying to do. Though, still in pretty early stages.
That’s really an impact on me. If voice/video communication works smoothly in Flash, then it would be really disruptive. And I’m wondering whether P2P video would be embedded into Flash someday. Wengo’s service makes everybody could setup a pay-per-call and video-call application just in seconds. Then why we need a Skype for pay per call?
Tech Tutorials: http://www.hotcoding.com
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It might be noted that in order to see the other bloggers who have it implemented, one has to click directly onto the animated balls in the flash image - each ball is linked to a blog. It is not immediately intuitive
Their attractive homepage has a very well design ‘minimalist’ theme
Remember two is a company , three a crowd.
Also looks like a good integrated product marketing stance.
http://www.tekno-world.blogspot.com
Video is and will be big so great addition. I am a liitle worried though about the heated discussions that could like develop from this kind of interaction.
I guess we will just have to wait. The company obviously understands the power of social networking hence its strategy…very good move.
I am now oof to read the previous post from Sis…… I will keep my response to a few lines, promise.
http://www.jollyjo.org
i think this is a great addition to the already wonderful world of blogging…blogging has helped many people create extra money to pay bills
A couple of frustrating things.
1. after clicking on 6 balls i finally found one blogger that actually had this thing installed. And when i tried to contact him, the thing just rang and rang.
wouldn’t it just be 100x better to simply have something like http://www.meebome.com (except what is up with having to actually log into meebo to use it, why can’t we just log into our messenger acounts and have it say on our websites “i am online right now…hit me up to talk)
2. i set up a widget on the http://www.wengovisio.com site. but at the end it just says “here is your code” and “go have fun now” it just kinda leaves you in the dark as to what to do next.
here is what i am looking for:
does anybody know of a meebome like thing that just lets you sign into a messenger and it shows up on your blog that you are online and that people can message you right through the site.
Wengo sounds like a neat idea, but the lack of group chat (at least by invite) seems like a major lacking feature.
All> thanks for yours coments, it’ll help us to better our widget and Wengo services.
Jason > we’re working on it
Adrian > thanks… new features soon
HonestForum > this Beta version will be improved, thanks you for your 2 great idea. We’ll take it into account.
David > in few days / weeks a chat will be added.
Patrick
Disclosure : I work for Wengo as Marketing Director