How To Add Video Chat Rooms To Your Web Site or Blog

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It used to be that people thought the Internet was only for porn and identify theft.  Those days are long gone, but still many people…especially Internet marketers…continue to hold misconceptions over what the Internet is about.

Specifically, many people still think the Internet is a marketing platform.  It’s not.  It’s a social platform.  The vast majority of people don’t go on the Internet to buy stuff.  They go online to find information and socialize with others (albeit electronically).

For example, if you’re like me, you probably spend more time communicating online with people you’ve never actually met…then you do with your neighbors living 50 feet from you.

Which brings us to today’s topic…video chat rooms.  They’ve long been around, however, up until maybe a year ago they’ve had seedy undertones.  That means they’ve mostly been used for porn.

But with the explosion of web video…and the technology associated with it…video chat rooms are now becoming more mainstream.  In fact, they are an excellent way to engage and socialize with your audience…or have your audience socialize with each other.

Still, the whole idea sounds kind of complicated…as in how do you even get a video chat room on your site?

Enter Oovoo.  They are a very progressive company that originally started out offering plain, old video chat services for cheap and even free.  They also happened to offer some of the best video chat quality available.

And recently, they’ve introduced Oovoo 2.0, which adds the ability for web site or blog owners to easily incorporate video chat rooms into their sites.

How easy?  Well, it goes like this:

1. Sign-up for an Oovoo account (you can go free or $10 a month, your choice).

2. You click a few buttons to customize your video chat room.

3. You copy and paste some code (a widget) into your web site or blog.

That’s it.  You’re done.  Up to six people at a time can enter the video chat room (without having to download any software first) and begin talking to each other.  As the owner of the chat room, you can require passwords to enter the room, only let people in if you yourself are in the room…or just let your audience freely chat (via video) by themselves.  It’s up to you.

The main drawback is that Oovoo is only available for Windows users.  It also does seem to be a bit slow loading up in a browser.  And there will be ad’s in the chat room (they’ve got to pay for the service somehow).

Beyond that, it can be an excellent tool for more personable communication with your audience…especially if you run some type of private membership group.  In fact, the new Oovoo video chat rooms are something I plan to play with in my own “private club” over at ClubWVU.com.

If you’d like to learn more about Oovoo video chat rooms, here is a video that explains it all step by step.

10 comments

  • I’ve been using ooVoo since their launch. It is an excellent service. I find the chat to load faster than Skype. The video quality surpass that of Skype too. Besides you get to see the person And yourself in a big windows. With sky you only get to see yourself in very tiny PIP window that you can’t even tell any detail. Seeying others and as well as yourself in a big window help in the interaction, in my opinion. The add does not appear in the owner’s chat window but does appear in the users as a banner. But they are really not distracting.

  • Thanks for the postivie post Dave – you have a very informative site. I work for ooVoo and just wanted to note that ooVoo does work for Mac and PC’s although the Mac version is a bit behind the PC version. In addition to the web video rooms that you mention, ooVoo 2.0 also introduced the web video call which allows you to send a link to a friend who doesn’t have ooVoo installed and have a video conversation with them in a browser.

  • Helloo,

    I have a forum and I like to add a chatroom with webcam. Something where I can grab the code to put it on my site. If possible for free because I’m handicapped.

    thanks