Gabmail Friday, February 02, 2007

In response to my post on eyejot yesterday, Nick Danger pointed me in the direction of Gabmail which also offers a flash based, browser hosted video email service. Similar to springdoo you can also embed the video created into a webpage. Gabmail doesn't require registration to use the service, albeit you are limited to 2 minutes of recording.




However, one interesting feature is the Gabjam, which allows anyone that is included on a message to see the video conversation thread thereafter. This feature reminds me of Yackpack, which I liked but never got round to actually using, albeit that is an audio service. Not sure I would use this but I can see that it has its' uses.


Just like eyejot and springdoo, Gabmail is very simple to use, albeit I did feel the sound & video quality was not as good as the other two from the limited tests I undertook. However one thing I did like was that Gabmail gives me a link of the video to copy into my own emails rather than sending the videoemail out direct with all of its corporate branding splashed across it.

One of my colleagues did ask me this morning how often I'm using videoemail and I realised that it came down to the following limited scenarios
Biggest challenge with video email that I've found is that many corporate PC's have the sound cards disabled, presumably so as not to disturb other workers in the office and because somebody decreed that sound from the PC doesn't/shouldn't feature in their work. Obviously the corporate IT dept personnel generally have headsets to enable them to listen to music all day, so they are fine! Fortunately, thanks to health & safety officials who are concerned about neck strain from perching the phone under one's neck so as to have two hands free, more people are getting access to headphones/headsets.

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posted by John Wilson @ 5:32 PM Permanent Link newsvine reddit



2 Comments:

At 1:59 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Gabmail, Springdoo, Sightspeed - all good products. We're working hard to make Eyejot great too. You raise a good point about links that you can embed in email, and that's a direction Gabmail has pursued.

The one thing we wanted to do, though, was get around email - and that's why we did the RSS thing for iTunes and tried to make a separate, walled-off inbox environment. Beside wanting to make sure you could get at your video inbox anywhere (anytime), we were trying to address the issue of important messages getting lost in the mix with spam email - which is, unfortunately, taking up an increasingly large amount of all of our inbox real estate.

 
At 4:02 PM, Blogger John Wilson said...

Whilst I can understand the email inbox concern, personally I am centralised around an email inbox (albeit consolidating several accounts) and an RSS reader. Adding a separate walled-off inbox would be an additional hassle, particularly for occasional usage.

Clearly different implementations will suit different folks and their respective preferences.

 

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