Online video chat is a growing feature that many sites, services, and software have started to support for their users. Anyone with a webcam can have a video chat online absolutely free at a variety of places, but not all of them are made equal. Depending on your needs, some video chat services will be better suited for you than others. The group of teenage friends looking to have a social conversation would want to use a different video chat platform that a group of business professionals conducting a meeting- let’s take a look at a few different solutions and decide which is best for your purposes.
One of the most popular ways to video chat for free is through the use of the VoiP software Skype. Skype is a desktop application that allows both voice and video chat between any two users free of charge. This includes a fully-featured video chat function, but group chat isn’t possible without paying. Skype is great for one on one video chats and audio calls.
Tinychat is a web-based video chat provider that lets you host or join a room with other people and chat with voice, video, and text. The interface is streamlined and the environment is more suited to casual users. A quick chat with some friends or an informal group video chat are a good fit for Tinychat. Professionals should use Skype instead in most cases.
Several social networks provide free video chat features in addition to their networking capabilities. For example, Google+ has a “hangouts” feature that allows users to quickly and easily start chatting in a group setting within an online interface. The video quality is great and the process is seamless and user friendly. Both professionals and casual users can comfortably use Google+ hangouts for group or one on one video chats. Facebook does not support group video chat as of this writing, but their feature set is always expanding.
Looking for something more fun and unpredictable to do with your webcam? Take a look at Chat Roulette- a website that allows you to video chat with random complete strangers. The random nature of the site promises an entertaining time, you never know who you will end up talking to. This is obviously not suitable for anything other than sheer entertainment value, but it’s a fun time waster. Tinychat also offers a random video chat feature on their site. Keep in mind that due to the anonymous nature of these random video chats, there may be some explicit content.
