Join live streaming video chat rooms

Camfrog for Mac is designed for those that want to meet new people on the net and have a chat using their webcam.

It sounds innocent enough and generally it is although its a bit disconcerting that it asks you for your marital status as mandatory during registration which takes no more than a minute? The Camfrog for Mac interface is similar to that of an IM client with contacts listed down the right hand side and a messaging box along the bottom. When you log in, you’re asked whether you want to join the main Camfrog room or a specific room such as “Latino”, “LearnEnglish”, “Single” and a special room for those using sign language.

When you log into a room, the rules are made clear such as “No disturbing the room with repeated text or spamming” and “No nudity or asking others to get nude”. The main Camfrog room is chaos though. Because there are several people all communicating at once, all you see is a flurry of random messages being exchanged between users. Click on a contact, and you can usually see their webcam (unless they are categorised as a “lurker” which means their webcam is paused for a while).

You can also hear conversations intermittently like you’re tuning in and out of a radio. In general, the whole thing is quite confusing. It would be fine to have a one-on-one chat on Camfrog Video Chat but interacting with several different users at once is like trying to catch rain water. If nothing else, it’s quite amusing just looking at people on their webcams who look equally confused as they stare at the messages scrolling past and scratch their heads. You also get the sense of a voyeur at times. It’s quite odd to accidentally tune into a conversation between a guy who’s explaining to his girlfriend that she and Camfrog are the best things that ever happened to him!

The sound and video quality are however pretty good and it’s amazing how many people are online. It’s much nicer to meet people “face-to-face” in this way rather than just chatting to them anonymously. It would be nicer to expand the size of the video but this is only available in the pro version. The same goes for seeing multiple videos at once. The overall interface is quite nice however – a lot better than the Windows version although that’s what you expect on Macs anyway.

There are plenty of people online and Camfrog for Mac has a lot of potential as a group collaboration tool. If you just want to meet friends though, you shouldn’t have any problems if you persevere.

Fixed problems with video capture on Mac OS X 10.7.Multi-threaded file transfer.Multi-threaded snapshot transfer.New design of IM for snapshots and file transfer.Support for new version of Growl.Dynamic stream reconnect.Many bug fixes and stability enhancements

Changes

• Fixed problems with video capture on Mac OS X 10.7.Multi-threaded file transfer.Multi-threaded snapshot transfer.New design of IM for snapshots and file transfer.Support for new version of Growl.Dynamic stream reconnect.Many bug fixes and stability enhancements