Group Video Chat

One of our online instructors asked about being able to have a video conference with her students. She wanted multiple people to log in from home with web cams and be able to see one another and talk. After doing some research and finding out that Skype only does one-to-one video chats, I found Mebeam and Tinychat. Tinychat seems most promising so far. Read this review of it. If you have a web cam and a mic, you can start a meeting, invite friends, see them all on video (if they have web cams too), hear them talk (if they have a mic), record the meeting, share your computer screen and text chat as well.

Just be careful and don't log in with your Twitter account because you will end up posting the chat room URL on Twitter. Then anyone can come into your chat room and start text chatting with you and all of your chats will post on Twitter. Moreover, if you feed your Tweets to Facebook, the chats will post to Facebook as well. That's what happened to me when I tried out the program for the first time. That's the danger of all these social networking crossovers. But also the cool part, if you do it intentionally.