Eyejot launches simple video e-mail service
Eyejot makes video e-mail really easy.
Launching at Demo 07 tomorrow: Eyejot, a simple and free video e-mail service that doesn't require a download. I tried the service last week and found it to be slick and very simple. It uses Flash to do what installed software video e-mail products do. The downside is that it's a separate service, so if you want to send a vid-mail, you've got to go to the Eyejot Web site to do so. Integration into e-mail clients is coming, CEO David Geller told me.
People receive Eyejot messages in their ordinary e-mail, as pointers to the video messages that are hosted on the Eyejot site. You also can go to Eyejot.com and view your video in-box there. Video quality is not stellar--if you bob your head your image will pixelate badly--but it's good for quick, informal messages.
Eyejot is a Web service, so of course there's a widget for it. You can embed a video greeting on your site and allow visitors to reply to you directly from the widget, which is slightly reminiscent of what Stickam offers. In my testing, the video greeting service was not yet working reliably, so I have not included my widget here.
In the free version of the service, the messages expire eventually, are advertising-supported, and are limited to 30 seconds each. If you pay for the "pro" version (about $5 a month), messages are retained indefinitely. You also can record longer messages, and transcode the messages to audio-only and 3GP formats for playing on mobile devices.
There are other video services that record to the Web directly from a Webcam (for example, Viddler), but I like Eyejot because it's conceptually simple and very easy to use. I'd like it better if it also allowed live two-way videocalls, though.