The duo Denis Mars and Arend Naylor have come up with a very useful web application that offers video chat with absolute ease. Meet with a co-worker, your project team members, hang out with your friends, get help from your teacher or speak to a customer, Meetings.io has made amazingly simple face to face online meeting without the need for installing complex software or joining a social network or having to add contacts. And all of that gratis.

After opening Meetings.io I just had to perform a few clicks and my meeting started. Frankly, it is as simple as that. No need to install any software in your computer, no need to sign up as any other video conferencing tool would have forced you to do. So, if you have webcam, microphone and headphone that’s enough. It gives you your meeting room URL after you click “get a Meeting Room”. You have to share that link to the person you want to video chat with. You need to allow this web app to get access to your hardware i.e. webcam, headphone and microphone. The site gives you an option to make your room public or private after it has been created.

Meetings.io uses a pure P2P (peer-to-peer) technology. It transmits video and audio data directly from one person to the other. This means that your communication happens directly between you and  your friends instead of being sent to a server first and then re-distributed. This significantly improves quality by decreasing latencies and improves security by not having 3rd party servers intercepting your communication. Since it is a web app that runs within a browser environment, it is compatible with any platform.

Another useful feature of this app is you can take note while doing your meeting because nothing gets done until it’s written down. Although signing up is not mandatory for Meetings.io, registered users can enjoy added benefits like creating a personalized room with a URL chosen by you. That room is yours and you can use it as many times as you like. Also you can play videos from YouTube, Vimeo and Dailymotion which can be viewed within the room. This reminds me of Google+ hangouts. Simply share any video link within your live group chat and click the link to play the supported video. Hopefully there’s more to come, and here’s what the founder’s have to say about where the product is headed to,

“We’re in the business of transforming everyday human interactions into wonderful online experiences by changing the way we fundamentally communicate with each other at work, at home, or on the go. Looking into the future, we believe humans will be spending more and more time communicating and interacting face to face online in much the same way we interact and communicate today but in person. Our job is to create products that allows us to conduct these rich interactions online whilst keeping the fidelity and productivity of an in person interaction.” – Denis Mars

Though it is still in beta mode and have some compatibility issues, I can still bet it will make a relief to people who don’t love to go through sign-up and software hassles for a simple video chat. Some of my contacts suggest, the app has some issues while running on a Linux computer, though I find no problem using it on Windows or Mac. Nonetheless, it’s a uniquely brilliant concept. In the next upgrade Meetings.io will be offering file sharing and screen sharing. So complex presentation will be possible later. For all the right reasons, it’s definitely worth a try.