MeBeam

» see mebeam.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A MeBeam room had no door. You put a word after mebeam.com and a slash, and the room existed because you had typed it. There was nothing to create and nothing to reserve, no owner and no moderator. If somebody else typed the same word they were in the room with you, and if nobody did you sat there alone looking at your own webcam.

Ashod Apakian put it online in November 2007. It ran entirely in Flash, so the requirement was a browser with Flash 8 or better and a camera, which by then meant any desktop operating system without anybody having to think about it. Up to sixteen people fit in one room, arranged in a grid of small video panes with audio mixed in. There was no account to make and nothing to install at any point in the process.

It made money from advertising around the edges of the grid, which was the only business model available to something you could not ask people to register for. It spread the way tools of that era spread, by being useful to somebody building something else. In August 2008 a plugin appeared that let Adium users start a MeBeam room from a chat window. It got onto the front page of Digg and Chris Pirillo picked it up from there. For a stretch it was the thing you sent someone when four of you needed to be on camera in the next thirty seconds.

The friction MeBeam removed was friction i wanted. Its pitch was talking to people you had not added to anything, and by 2007 my chat life was MSN, which everyone in Turkey was on and which had video built into it already. Sending a stranger a URL was a solution to a problem the contact list had already handled. i can see exactly who this was for, and it was people whose group did not all live inside one messenger.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ a room was a url ~

The no-signup decision is the whole design and it cuts both ways. It made MeBeam the fastest way to get a group onto video that existed in 2008, faster than Skype because Skype needed everyone to have Skype. It also meant the room had no memory of you. Close the tab and there is no history and no contact saved, nothing to come back to.

That is also what made it unmoderatable. Anybody who guessed a room name was in it, and there was no owner with a button to remove them. The same property that made it frictionless made it impossible to run, which is the trade every anonymous video product of that decade made and mostly lost. Chatroulette hit the identical wall from the other direction two years later with a much larger audience.

~ sixteen faces in flash ~

Sixteen simultaneous video streams in a browser in 2007 was not a small thing. Flash was doing the camera capture and the encoding as well as the network, and there was no other way to get video out of a browser at all until WebRTC turned up years afterward. Everything in this category sat on the same runtime, which is why everything in this category has the same expiry date stamped on it.

The quality was what the connection allowed and the panes were postage stamps, and nobody minded, because the alternative was arranging a time and getting four people to install the same client. MeBeam's competition was not better video chat. It was the phone.

~ the move to koowy ~

By April 2011 mebeam.com was serving a relocation notice telling visitors the service now lived at koowy.com and asking them to update their bookmarks, with a guestbook to sign on the way out. Renaming a product whose entire value is that people already know the URL to type is a strange move, and it does not appear to have worked. By late 2012 the site was answering under the MeBeam name again.

That November 2012 page is the last one the archive holds with the product on it. There is no shutdown post, no farewell and no date anybody announced. The domain surfaces again in 2017 carrying a promise about a brand new version and bitcoins for chatting, which is what a name looks like after the thing it named has stopped existing. By then video chat had gone back to being a feature inside the app you were already signed into, which is where it had been before MeBeam and where it has stayed since.

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