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TokBox: Best Practices and Product Suggestions

Posted by John Saddington on Dec 24, 2008

TokBox. Everyone’s talking about it.  In fact, so much so that I’ve either been personally pinged by some of their staff and development team or they’ve dropped lines to others within the technoevangelical circuit.

That’s huge.  It means they’re listening.  A company that does it well is worth my time.  And it makes me want to listen even more.

tokbox_bestpractices

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve received nearly 200 or so emails, personal DM’s via Twitter, or had IM conversations (over TokBox) with both groups and individuals on how to best “use” TokBox”.

Here is a concentrated list of what I’ve learned and what others have submitted as well as some product suggestions made by our community.  I would encourage you to share this list!

***Please note that I will update this list with any additional feedback as it comes in…!***

TokBox Best Practices – Managing the Chaos:

  1. Establish “ground rules” for your meeting.  Some of the following may apply.
  2. Agenda – Have an agenda before you start.
  3. Definitive “Start and End” time to your “organized” conversation, especially if you are having an “open” invite.
  4. Headphones are EPIC.  Most have.  Require your users to get them and use them.
  5. Muting your mic if you’re not talking.
  6. Require that all participants be in a “reasonable” location.  No ambient noise. Starbucks is a terrible location, fyi.
  7. Sit in a well-lit space.  The “I live in a dark cave” thing is so 90’s.
  8. Cap the size of your “conversation”.
  9. Use the “Twitter” button carefully.
  10. Establish a Moderator or “someone in charge” of the meeting.
  11. Upgrade to Flash 10. Download here: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/
  12. Have everyone check their settings for both video and mic.  Adjust as necessary.
  13. Grade School Participation:  Raising hands or another “understood” visual cue to ask for permission to speak works.
  14. Pause video if you’re going to be absent for a while.  This apparently cuts down bandwidth load for other participants.
  15. Have the most up to date browser versions:
    Mozilla Firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/
    Microsoft Internet Explorer: http://tinyurl.com/3242ra
    Apple Safari: http://www.apple.com/safari/download/
    Opera: http://www.opera.com/
  16. Close other unused applications on your computer.  This dedicates more resources to your TokBox.
  17. Close any unused browser windows as well.
  18. Change your status while in a session to “Away”.
  19. Use some of the “few” moderator-like capabilities of shutting down annoying members or muting/ignoring others when necessary. – [TriuneDesigns.com]
  20. Try using the 1:1 Chat Plugin: http://plugins.tokbox.com/z/human3rror (just changed human3rror to your own handle). – [Lightmanx5]
  21. Create your own embed! API baby: http://www.tokbox.com/#embed=call
  22. …

TokBox Product Suggestions – Making it Better

  1. Robust moderation tools for the creator of the conversation are essential!
  2. Kicking/banning.
  3. Mute-all.
  4. Force-mute or “presentation mode”.
  5. Timer
  6. Additional media tools.
  7. Closing/opening comment section.
  8. “Promoting users”, etc.
  9. Requirements settings, like browser and flash version check.
  10. Better GUI for user search.
  11. Groups and partitioning of your friend list.
  12. Better “Add friends” for mass-adding, etc.
  13. Better public timeline management, mass clearing, deleting, etc.
  14. More robust and complete profile.
  15. More integrations with other social networking services.
  16. Custom “Greeting Cards” and templates.
  17. Better Search. Period.
  18. TokBox Air Client is not complete… does not provide similar experience.
  19. Build out the Friend List.
  20. WordPress and other blogging platform widgets and plugins.
  21. Locking Camera positions in the window – [lightvox.com]
  22. Mute on Entry – [lightvox.com]
  23. Better visual cues of who is talking, perhaps lighting up the box of the speaker – [djchuang.com]
  24. Push to Talk button – [mergeworship]

Please add more to this list as it grows!  Comment below!

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John Saddington

John is the Chief Editor @ The 8BIT Network and Senior Blog Junkie here at ChurchCrunch.He enjoys Triple-Tall Americanos, developing Wordpress Themes, and a few other Random Things.

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20 Responses to “TokBox: Best Practices and Product Suggestions”

  1. Christopher
    Wednesday, December 24, 2008 at 4:15 am

    Great suggestions. I was thinking about this the other night.

    Mute on entry to a conference and a click to talk button is much needed. This way people are not talking over each other or breathing into their headsets (unless of course you are Darth Vader and it's a convention tokbox conference)

    Also, they need a way to lock camera positions. People going in and out was driving me crazy as cameras shuffled around to accommodate the spaces as they opened up. If someone enters the conference add them at the end of the checkerboard or drop them in a space that opened up.

    Reply
    • human3rror
      Wednesday, December 24, 2008 at 4:35 am

      sweet. adding these to the list with some love too… one sec.

      Reply
  2. tonysteward
    Wednesday, December 24, 2008 at 4:54 am

    Great post John, all of these things would be tremendously helpful. Yeah!

    Reply
    • human3rror
      Wednesday, December 24, 2008 at 5:09 am

      thanks tony. watsup.

      Reply
  3. djchuang
    Wednesday, December 24, 2008 at 4:56 am

    great list of product enhancements! (were these added to tokbox's getsatisfaction list already?) i'd like to see light-up halo for person speaking — noticed new status bar on gotomeeting that indicates who's spking

    Reply
    • human3rror
      Wednesday, December 24, 2008 at 5:10 am

      added. thanks dj!

      Reply
  4. damon billian
    Wednesday, December 24, 2008 at 6:40 am

    Wow, a super list of possible product enhancements. I will be sure to ping our Product lead:)

    Widgets & plugins: A little curious here. We actually just launched a number of enhancements to our embed feature, which includes making it easier to add an embed to most nearly every major blogging & social networking platform. We also have an API available:)

    Reply
    • human3rror
      Saturday, December 27, 2008 at 2:03 am

      i think a lot of the people (and readers) are looking for more "out of the box" types that are super easy to implement. are you guys thinking about developing a robust development community? that would be awesome!

      Reply
  5. Leo Wurschmidt
    Thursday, December 25, 2008 at 3:47 am

    For the TokBox best practices or use suggestions?? You can adjust other user's settings on your end. I have used this quite a few times. If someone has bad feedback (use the headphones!!!) then I turn their volume down on the top bar. This helps me out. This allows me to tweak how loud or quiet someone is on my computer. Awesome!

    Also, you can "close" someone out by hitting the "x" in their box (I think). It essentially pauses them on your computer while everyone else can still see him. I have used this for disruptive individuals. I had one guy in a large group chat jump in and was only trying to disturb everyone. I closed him out and I was able to concentrate on everyone else who was talking. Very nice.

    Reply
  6. SCBubba
    Saturday, December 27, 2008 at 2:27 am

    Thanks for putting this list together (and updating it). Tokbox has the potential to be a great tool. Just needs to get some more "mature" features like you listed. Any thoughts on jumping in with the tokbox team (on tokbox I would guess) and having a chat? You probably could swing that… :-)

    Reply
    • human3rror
      Saturday, December 27, 2008 at 2:39 am

      one of their marketing managers pinged me and asked about using it for the new year or christmas… i was actually planning on it…!

      Reply
  7. SCBubba
    Saturday, December 27, 2008 at 2:50 am

    Dude, I can't get a single step ahead of you, can I? :-)

    Peace.

    Reply
  8. adam_herod
    Saturday, December 27, 2008 at 3:53 am

    Great list! A freind of mine suggested that they have a "push to talk" feature if someone didn't have headphones (or maybe even if they did) to cut down on the ambient noise on their end.

    Reply
    • human3rror
      Monday, December 29, 2008 at 5:14 am

      that's awesome! i'm adding that.

      Reply

  1. TokBox Gets Facelift and Improved Features - ChurchCrunch

    [...] to the RSS feed for updates! // Tokbox has recently gone under the knife and recovered to provide a number of features that’ll make you smile, some of which we’ve suggested previously! It’s great to [...]

  2. human3rror (human3rror)

    I’ve updated my gigantic list of TokBox “Best Practices” with your user suggestions… got any more? http://bit.ly/iVjh