I woke up this morning to find out the announcement of 2 new features: MeeboRooms on Meebo and full-screen streaming TV on vpod.
Both features are great add-ons to these sites. I really like what Rodrigo, Ivan and their team are doing with vpod. Their premium video player is sleek and clean and the loading time extremely fast. Of course, as YouTube & Co know very well, the Achille heel of such services is the pressure success can put on the backend infrastructure and the associated costs. This is one of the reasons why we, at AllPeers, believe distributed content over a P2P network is the only long-term viable solution for such businesses if they want to control their costs efficiently. This is no trivial task and a lot of innovations is still required both at the network architecture level and the consumer equipments level but there is no doubt, at least for me, the YouTubes of the future will contain some form of distributing computing (beyond the browser as we know it today).
Chat rooms are a great addition to existing online properties and sure enough the move from Meebo is a great one. There again, the centralized nature of such a service is its Achille heel (why would they limit to 80 participants if they did not have backend limitations?) but this is not the most important issue. Just like AOL discovered in its early days, the problem in public chat rooms is not the technology. It’s the people or more precisely the abuse people can inflict to each other thanks to the “anonymity” of the web. Sure enough, NewTeeVee had to disable their Meebo public room after 2 and a half hours because “the moderation had become too intensive”. If you are going to run public chat rooms be prepared for your 2 worst enemies: Abusive users and SpamBot. The best protection against these pests are moderators and SpamBot Removers. If you are lucky enough to have a thriving community you can rely on volunteers. You will need to hire a community moderator manager who will have to play the bad/good cop all day dealing with complaints of moderators abusing their “power”. The alternative is of course to pay for professional moderators but in both case do not think that introducing public chat rooms is only a matter of throwing a few lines of HTML into a webpage.
Anyway, I sound like an old whiner and that’s not the goal. Good luck to these new services!
