What can you use the application for?


Tokbox.com is a browser-based online video conferencing solution. The site allows the user to conduct a video chat with up to 20 people at one time. The site allows the user to use their instant messenger account to initiate video chats or the user’s email address book can be imported. The site supports IM clients Gtalk, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger or AIM. Email contacts can be imported from Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL. In addition, video chats can be initiated via Facebook, Twitter or MySpace. The user also has the option of sharing a link to the video chat using any method they desire.
The Tokbox.com site takes care of all the details and hosts the chat at a dedicated URL that exists as long as the chat session is in progress. The user can invite up to 20 people to join the chat, the the service is an excellent video conferencing solution. Users can also use the service to send a video message to any of their contacts from the supported services. Contacts can be entered directly on the Tokbox.com site as well, and all imported contacts appear in the user’s Tokbox contacts directory. The site also offers a premium service that allows the user to schedule a chat session – the site takes care of all the invitations to the chat and if anyone is not available at that time and date, the site takes care of the details of scheduling a time that all participants can attend.

What is the history and popularity of the application?


Tokbox.com was launched in October 2007 by Serge Faguet and Ron Hose and is based in the South Market district in San Francisco, CA. Ian Small is currently CEO of the site, while Mickey O’Brien is VP of Marketing and Business Development and Yang Cao is VP of Engineering.

What are the differences to other applications?


Competition to Tokbox.com comes from sites such as Webex.com and Ivisit.com. Webex.com is owned by Cisco, and offers a free trial of their paid service, but does not offer an entirely free service. Ivisit.com offers both free and paid premium plans, as well as a premium mobile chat application. Both of these services offer similar features to Tokbox.com, however Tokbox.com offers more features in their free service.

How does the application look and feel to use?


The Tokbox.com site has a very Web 2.0 look and feel. The site is quite responsive, and the video chat application performed without glitches. Navigation is intuitive, and the service is very easy to use. The video chat application is entirely browser based – only an Internet connection, microphone and web cam are required to use the service. There is no advertising displayed on the Tokbox.com site.

How does the registration process work?


Registration to Tokbox.com is free and is required to use the site. The registration process asks for real name, email address, age and password. Validation of the email address is not required.

What does it cost to use the application?


A free basic account allows the user access to all feature of the service except for video chat scheduling and chat moderation. These features can be added by purchasing a premium plan for $9.99 per month.

Who would you recommend the application to?


The Tokbox.com site is recommended to anyone who needs a simple, easy to use video chat or conferencing solution. The free plan is sufficient for most needs, however the scheduling feature adds real versatility to the application. The service is ideal for individuals as well as organizations. The ability to chat with up to 20 people at one time makes Tokbox.com the most capable video conferencing solution available.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote up a case study around the perplexing case of designing user experiences for lead generation pages. I’m going to cover the results of our test shortly, but in the meantime I wanted to share part of the conversion funnel that has forever changed the way I’m going to design for sign-ups.

Designers do a lot of work engineering the experience of creating compelling sign-up forms for a variety of reasons (joining communities, requesting more information, age-gating verification, etc.). I’d like to take a closer look at how the Thank You page of the conversion flow can be leveraged more effectively for experiences that aren’t necessarily tied to joining a social network.

That said, social networking sites are full of awesome examples where the Thank You jumpstarts the user’s uptake, so if you’re:

• Tumblr, you have your user create her first blog post
• Twitter, you have your user find cool people to follow
• LinkedIn, you connect with your email address book
• Meetup, you have your user join a group

But, let’s say you’re a more traditional (perception = less fun) business like a university, can you do more than guide your user towards more descriptive content about the program or services offered (where bounce rate will be high)? How can you make the most of that transaction? How can you parlay the validation “Thank You” into action that can be both inspiring and measurable?

Thank You messaging is not supposed to feel like the awkward end of a first date “Do I kiss him?” moment.

The user has shared her information with you, triggering a response and follow up campaign. She’s staring at the Thank You page, confirming she submitted her information correctly. This is a powerful moment to turn your Thank You into more than:

• a data verification step
• a reiteration of your brand’s identity and tagline
• a jumping off into content (where the bound rate will be high and not super effective in terms of engagement, relationship development, etc.)

Social marketing channels have helped turn Thank You pages into opportunities for secondary levels of conversion where you can experiment with Facebook Fan Page and/or Twitter acquisition.

This brings me back to the use case at hand, while our lead gen page had a number of design constraints, we found that we had a lot of artistic leeway in creating a Thank You page, so we decided to make the number one goal of the page to excite the user to join our Facebook Fan page.

First, let’s look at the original Thank You page, which did include Facebook & Twitter opportunities:

(Note: I apologize for striking through the brand name, my client is a major university and getting approval to share the brand is a bit of a juggernaut.)

Now, let’s look at the redesign of the Thank You page, which puts primary focus on Facebook Fan acquisition v. promoting both Twitter and Facebook equally:

The design:

• Inspired by the idea of the excitement around an “acceptance letter”
• Focused on the fun of university life and community
• Featured access to current students, faculty, and admissions through Facebook

The results:

• Increased Fan Page uptake from 28 fans per week (a consistent rate for one year) to 300+ fans per week (2+ weeks of ongoing data)
• Increased the quality of interactions on the Fan Page, where we were encouraged to see prospects asking questions that were fielded by students, admissions, and faculty
• Increased interaction with blog content, driving traffic to the parent site and making better use of all editorial collateral

As You Design Conversion Experiences Thank You Messaging is:

• Integral—A necessary part of the conversion experience, it’s no longer just a simple hello/goodbye world
• Instantly Gratifying—If you’re testing a conversion experience the results are ongoing and take time. Adding a secondary conversion exercise like Facebook Fan acquisition is an immediate way to leverage (in real time) effects of your messaging
• Social—Leverages warm fuzzies in innovative ways and gets users connecting with one another
• Sticky—The last thing the user will remember about your brand, and can have the added possibility of taking the conversation even deeper into her personal network

Perhaps, the biggest takeaway from designing a great Thank You experience is that the more you can leverage the Thank You, they more you can get your users to connect with your app and with each other the less money you’ll need to spend on post conversion campaigns, marketing, and more. I’d love to hear your experiences around the “Thank You” in your designs, examples, etc.

Thank you!

*Design by my brilliant partners at jjomedia.com

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Google Buzz lets users share posts and notes with people they are connected to or “follow,” a model similar to Twitter and Facebook. But unlike those services, it automatically signs users up to follow people they email and chat with the most through Gmail. It also makes that list of first followers public, by default. That decision has triggered a wave of complaints from users concerned the feature would inadvertently publicizing the names of people they frequently emailed with, like a spouse or ex-boyfriend.

The critics say that Google doesn’t understand that some people don’t want their email contacts to become their social networking contacts, period.

“Users’ are being enticed to accept Buzz without fully understanding that the email address book is becoming their friends list,” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Rotenberg says EPIC plans to file a complaint Tuesday to the Federal Trade Commission, arguing that by blending the two – namely, treating users’ email contacts as social networking contacts – Google is guilty of “unfair and deceptive trade practices.”

Rotenberg called it a rare miscalculation for Google, which he said has been conscientious about giving users control over their privacy. “Google has generally been pretty savvy” about privacy considerations while rolling out new products, he said. “And still, they blundered big time.”

In an interview Friday, Google product manager Todd Jackson, said the Google Buzz product isn’t set in stone and that the company is working on new features, some of which will address privacy concerns. “It’s still early, and we have a long list of improvements on the way,” he said, declining to go into detail. “We look forward to hearing more suggestions and will continue to improve the Buzz experience with user transparency and control top of mind.”

“Giving our users choice and control over their information is very important to us,” said Jackson, who declined to comment about the possible EPIC complaint.

Google has already made some changes. On Thursday, the company made the option to hide the people you are “following” more prominent – helping users keep names of close contacts — whom Buzz may have signed them up to “follow” automatically — hidden if they want to. A complete list of the changes can be found here.

When asked why the company didn’t include these modifications initially, Jackson said Google “thought about it really hard and went through multiple iterations on the design based on feedback from user research and Googlers.” The company decided to prepopulate some followers to make “the getting started experience” as seamless as possible “so that users wouldn’t have to manually peck out another social network entirely from scratch.” He said the company has gotten a lot of positive feedback about the feature.

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This brought a few things to mind. Most obviously, it highlights the fact that MySpace is struggling right now and turning to traditional marketing tactics to try and win back users. Beyond that though, it’s a reminder of the differences between MySpace and rival Facebook, and how MySpace is looking to highlight those in an effort to remain relevant.

MySpace leads their marketing email promoting MySpace Music, which the company bills as “the largest supply of songs on the Internet.” Music remains perhaps MySpace’s most distinctive advantage over Facebook, and truth be told, is a fairly impressive service, though rumors that the latter will launch a service of its own or forge a tight partnership with someone like iLike persist.

Continuing on my 3-point email from MySpace, the social network promotes the option to upload your email address book to find friends. This has become standard fare on social networks, but perhaps wasn’t as key to MySpace in its early days, when the site was largely about accumulating as many friends as possible versus connecting with those you already know. Now that it has mimicked a number of Facebook’s features, like the news feed, it’s clearly trying to bring people who know each other closer together by plugging this feature.

That said, this pitch brought back the memory of a profile of Rupert Murdoch that I read in Esquire last year, where he told the magazine that “[users of] Facebook, they tend to go in to contact friends, to look up who they are going to be in college with, to find old friends, or whatever. On MySpace, people go look for new friends.”

That’s very much still in play in my Welcome Back email, as MySpace pitches their “People you may know” feature, which works much like that on Facebook, analyzing friends of friends and looking for connections.

The problem with this feature on MySpace is that because of the mass accumulation of friends that took place by many users, it’s harder for the social network to make quality recommendations. I only see one person I actually know in my suggested list, and it’s someone I’ve met once in my life. Mind you, Facebook’s feature is starting to suffer from a similar problem as my network becomes far less personal.

So what’s the moral of the story (or email as the case may be)? Primarily, it seems, that MySpace doesn’t want to go down quietly, and will attempt to win back former users with its new features. But it also highlights the evolution of social networks over the past few years, and sheds some light on why Facebook ultimately won the most recent round of battle in the space.

However, Facebook is starting to exhibit similar attributes to MySpace, including an influx of brands with increased prominence on the site, and the broadening of user’s social graphs to include very loose connections versus the once much more intimate environment. Thus, is it just a matter of time before Facebook sees a similar decline and gives rise to someone else? History says yes, but recent numbers suggest clearly not. What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Tags: facebook, myspace, social networking