I’m pretty sure this is a first for the industry. AnyMeeting put out a press release today announcing the ability for anyone to run a web meeting with absolutely no signup and no account.
The company refers to the new service as “AnyMeeting Now.” You simply go to the company’s home page and click the big green button at the top of the page labeled “Start a meeting now!”
Instantly the software starts up a web meeting in your browser. It gives you a meeting link you can share with participants. It gives you a U.S. long distance number and access code you can use for an audioconference. And it lets you decide whether to show your webcam or not. And that’s it. You are in a fully operational screen share-based web conference with a capacity of up to 200 attendees. You can see the names of participants as they join, you can chat via type, you can share your full screen or a named application. You can display polls and show the results.
The amazing thing about this is that you have not filled in a single form, shared your email address with the company, or registered for a trial account. You just click through to their site, have a meeting, and go away. Astonishing in this day and age where collecting people’s personal information is the number one priority for vendors.
I’m not sure how long it will take for this to devolve into a haven for amateur pornography. It sounds like a multi-party version of Chat Roulette once people figure out that they can turn on their webcam and invite strangers to click through to their published link via a simple Twitter post. But in the meantime, it could be a great tool for real business needs for folks who are leery of signing up for trials or free accounts under the assumption that they will be hounded forevermore by slavering salespeople.
I love this commoditization of basic web conferencing. It not only democratizes the field and drives costs down for basic functionality, but it forces vendors to step up their game to justify higher costs for more extensive features and functionality. That’s good for everybody.
