The TinyChat Saga
TinyChat is a great little tool that allows you to create and manage text and video chat rooms, all using an easy-to manage interface. The basic operations are free, but they limit some of the control and capabilities to paid membership. Subscribing gives you the options of creating persistent chatrooms, password-protecting those rooms, recording your video, and retrieving that video for later use.
Earlier this summer, I was looking for an all-in-one solution for video-conferencing and broadcasting. There were plenty of tools that allow you to do one or the other, but none that really do both well. Along comes TinyChat with the option to do both. I gave it a test, it worked like a charm, and I was instantly sold. I subscribed, and didn’t look back to my former tools.
Fast-forward to August: I created a recording, went to the download page, and was unable to find it. I e-mailed support, and go no response for a few days. Then, when I did get the response, it was simply “Well, that seems to happen sometimes, sorry about that.” While this might work well for the average regular user, that’s not the response a paying customer should receive. I pressed a little, and was told that sometimes, if there is corruption in the incoming stream (which they believed there was), recordings will fail. This response, while not really fixing my issue, at least let me know that someone had looked into it, and I could do a few checks at my end before starting a recording to help keep the process stable.
Fast-forward again to last week: My subscription payment goes through on 9/2 just like it should. To verify, I go to my TinyChat members page, only to find that my subscription is not active. I immediately contact TinyChat’s support with the details. After a few hours of waiting, I tested the waters and tried to send a Twitter DM. Since TinyChat is not following me back, I’m not able to do that. I give it a day and try again.
On 9/3, I get an @reply asking what the problem is, as the message may have gotten lost. I reiterate what I can in 140 characters, and they ask for the e-mail I have attached to the account. I reply, asking for them to DM me a contact e-mail. They reply with a request to send an e-mail, ATTN: Support, which I send on the morning of 9/4.
That afternoon, I got a response, again asking for the e-mail address the account is registered to, explaining that sometimes the PayPal response can get messed up going into their system. I replied immediately with the details.
That was the last e-mail response I got from them. Over the entire weekend, I sent e-mails and twitter messages attempting to get any kind of response. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, I send in a request for 3 things: Access to my account so I can download previous recordings, cancellation of my subscription, and a refund of the payment that was taken on 9/2. Since it was a holiday weekend, I didn’t hold out much hope for a response.
After zero contact by yesterday, I sent out another Twitter message, hoping to get some type of response. This morning, I receive a response from @harknesslabs: “I am going to take care of it today and hook you up with a free lifetime account. Will email you after its done.”
Finally, a real response. I check out the Twitter account, @harknesslabs belongs to Daniel Blake, the CEO of TinyChat itself. Later today, I also see the following message: Hired someone to handle support for @tinychat today. So it seems that Dan has known for a while that they have needed someone to handle support duties, this looks like a good sign.
As of this writing, my account has been re-activated, and I’ve been able to access my rooms and recordings. I haven’t gotten the e-mail from Dan yet with the notice that everything’s done, but at this point, it doesn’t really matter. I appreciate the gesture, and I will definitely use TinyChat for certain things, but not for anything that has any real critical bearing, at least not for a while. For my broadcast needs, I managed to put together an Adobe Flash Media Server instance that I can fire up and take down at will via Amazon EC2 (I’m going to detail the steps for this at a later time), which I will use when I need something to work just right.
I hope that TinyChat can get these issues resolved and, in the end, turn out a great product that people will line up to pay for. I’ll be keeping an eye on their future development, and will be sure to let anyone know how things are going if they have an interest.
Thanks, Dan. I hope you don’t have to do this type of thing much more/at all.