Shoot the message

From podcast to videocast and now video email, the evolution has been swift. Initially, video email was limited to a select few and was supposed to be the next frontier. But now your four-year-old can send you an email even though he can’t type a word with just a few clicks.
The solution I present to you is not for four-year-olds, but it is easy enough for my eight-year-old niece to send me a video mail every now and then. TokBox.com is not exactly new, but as soon as I discovered this free video messaging service I wanted to go out, jump up in joy and share it with you like a new toy.

How does it work? It uses the webcam and microphone built into your PC/laptop to record a video message and send it as an email to the recipient. Since the recipient could be on a slow connection or his mailbox of a limited size, Tokbox just sends an image grab of the video and a link inviting the recipient to check out the video message. There was no buffering or stopping on the 256 kbps broadband I checked it on and the videos played seamlessly. The interface is clean and simple; in fact, it took my niece just about 15 minutes to master.

The Tokbox site uses the Adobe Flash plug-in, which means you don’t have to install anything on your PC to use the software. To avoid having to go to multiple websites, you can shoot and share the video with your Twitter and Facebook friends directly from the website. You can also login to AOL Messenger, Google Talk, MSN Messenger and Yahoo using the Tokbox instant messenger, giving you a single screen to send and receive video emails. And if you want, you can video blog to Twitter, Facebook or MySpace all from the same page.

TokBox lets you invite your friends to use the site, but this is not necessary for them to watch your message. But they will have to register to send back a video reply. In case your friends are also online on TokBox, you can always do a video call.

TokBox even has some graphic templates in the greetings section that let you overlay your video with graphics to give it a greeting card feel.

On the flip side, the quality of the full-screen video playback is pretty bad. But that is a small price to pay for a brilliant free service like this.

So what are you waiting for, send me a video mail.
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The above article appeared in the Indian Express, on Sunday Jan 10, 2010 (Yes, 01/01/10)