Advercation = Advertising + Education

I use lots of web apps. I build them for clients, I try them for fun, and use them for getting stuff done in life in general.

Most of them though I’ll log into once, poke around, and then never come back to. Some become an integral part of my daily life (twitter, facebook, workstreamr, etc.).

And it’s really not often that a new web app comes along that joins this revered list. Well, I think another just did: TokBox.

In a nut shell, TokBox lets you send video voice mails and have unlimited participant video conference calls (I got up to about 13 people simultaneously today). Oh, and it’s entirely browser based, free, and embedable.

Today Leora and I were chatting and I enjoyed the ease of initiating a video call by her just clicking on my tokbox link (http://www.tokbox.com/corbett3000):

I then threw my link over to Leslie on google chat so that she could call me…once she did, hit the ‘merge call’ button and she joined our video chat:

We then tried out the Conference Call function, and you can see below we’ve got 5 video conference users (Zvi and Sam joined) and one voice only (our friend didn’t have a camera). You’re able to join a conference call by simple clicking a link…you can see ours to the left of the headshots below.

Then a few of us tweeted the conference link and a bunch of people showed up (the black boxes/voice only are people configuring their cameras):

Tokbox is in beta at the moment, and I’m happily providing feedback as an ‘interested user’, so if you’ve used the tool and have something to say, please leave a comment here!