Just like to share about dimdim.com. Nopz, this is not a social networking site like friendster or myspace, nor a paid blogging site, ad site or a multilevel marketing site where i'd convince you to sign for me to get a referral fee 🙂
Dimdim.com is a web conferencing/meeting service/platform similar to the popular WebEx or GotoMeeting. The only catch is it's for FREE. Yes you read it right. For Free. [more]
Just go to www.dimdim.com. Sign up, start a meeting, allow some plugin/extension to be installed in your browser (and allow it to access some resources if you have a personal firewall – which I also recommend in my case ZoneAlarm) then you're good to go.
When I had to use it, our needs were simple : to share my desktop and it was straightforward.
I believe that it also has support for voice (access to your microphone) and video (on top of the online screen sharing – and thus access to a webcam).
Furthermore, it has a "shared whiteboard" feature where you have some sort of a painter application on screen then you can either do the writing/painting or unlock it and let the other attendees write/paint to. How cool is that.
Once sharing, you will have a link at the upper right for "Meeting Info". clicking on it will popup a dialog with the meeting url. just share it.
The only concern you might have is that:
1) if you are the starter of the meeting and thus the presenter, you can't view how your desktop appears. The work-around for this is to join the meeting from another browser instance (just tried and works).
2) if sharing a desktop, the whole desktop is shared and no option to share only a region, a window or hiding the taskbar. Now I cant remember very well if WebEx or GTM has this feature but if you're particular about this one then you might not want it and find another solution supporting it.
3) I believe you can't change presenter or allow another attendee to control the mouse/keyboard
4) I'm not sure but I didn't notice an authentication support like requiring attendees to enter password
5) Some limitations: like Maximum participants is 20, maximum meeting length of 2 hrs 45 mins, maximum attendee mics to 3.
I also didn't dig much deeper on the level of access and security risk the application poses but I don't have critical, confidential files on this machine and I can restore it from my Acronis Secure Zone Restore anytime. Plus the added confidence on Firefox 3, IE and ZoneAlarm (i opt to not "always" whatever prompts that needs needs access to restricted resource).
Bottomline; for most of my requirements and I have nothing to hide on my desktop 🙂 this is more than just good enough for me. Need not post screen shots, just go ahead and try it, I'm sure you'd find your way around.
Hope you'd find it useful too.
** Thanks to Ozer UNAT for introducing this cool stuff to me 🙂