Freemor's Old Weblog

SnapYap.com – A quick review

After my post on Tokbox’s growing pains and continuing evolution I was invited to take a look at SnapYap.com and see what I thought.

So, I went, I saw, I liked. With a few minor nigglings that are much more specific to me then to the service.

Thing I liked:

Their privacy policy and Terms of Service are easy to find and sensible.

The interface is clean, attractive, simple and easy to understand. I fully feel I could send anyone to the site and they’d be able to use it right off the bat.

It follows the “do one thing and do it well” line of thought. It’s about sending and receiving video calls/messages nothing more. It’s not trying to be a do video everything site.

It worked

I does not store the log-in state in LSO’s in fact their use of LSO’s is minimal.

Things I think could be improved:

In their registration they ask for date of birth. Being a Privacy/Security minded techie I’d prefer to see this changed to the more general “Age:” or eliminated if possible. They also ask for “Zip code:”, again I’d prefer to see a more general “Location:” type question. However given their sensible Privacy policy I was not too aggrieved by the above.

The Nigglings I mentioned:

When I first went to their site it failed to do anything video related. This was not their fault but instead due to the fact that I have a rather draconian firewall in place and their flash component was trying to make connections using ports outside the usual http/https/etc range. I was quickly able to resolve this but they may wish to include some documentation for other people less firewall/router savvy.

The other tiny (thus nigglie) thing was that their badge/banner used tags and wordpress.com doesn’t deal well with those so I had to modify the code slightly to get the badge on this blog. Again, not a major thing. It would just be nice if they provided and non-script, non-flash, badge that would easily embed into more restrictive hosting sites.

Conclusion:

From my early perusal of the site SnapYap.com seem to be a cool site. I’ll definitely be both keeping an on on where they are going and passing the word about them on to others.