Helloworld

The Good

Helloworld wants to be a full service, one stop shop, video communication provider. The membership to their site includes video mail, video podcasting, four user video chat service provided by Userplane.com, live broadcasting, media storage, and video encoding into different formats. Helloworld has a powerful user interface they call collaboration suite. It includes a rich email account where they built in a video recorder. After logging into the site there is much to see and learn. Everything is in slow motion. Once logged in you can respond to emails sent to your Helloworld.com email address, yourname@helloworld.com. Their system is better for personal use than business use, because you will have ads for helloworld.com you can't get rid of. They allow you to respond to incoming emails with video or type a text email or both. You get video watched notification, disable video feature, and customizable graphics around the video screen, some areas of the video template is reserved for promoting their MLM affiliates. Even paying customers can not remove the self promotion links in the template. They plan to launch a business version targeted to small to medium sized businesses. It will be a copy of the Helloworld.com site, except with higher fees. The single biggest feature of First Stream is SMTP server set up, allowing a business to appear to be sending videomails from within their company, not from a First Stream of Helloworld account. This is important since serious users will want control of the domain that the video is coming from. Helloworld and First Stream are available through their affiliate sales network (reps). They aggressively promote their network marketing sales team, or you can buy direct either way the fee is the same.  Starting at $9.95/ month up to $39/ month. Business accounts are expected to start at $69/ month and as I said is almost an exact copy of the Helloworld model. Helloworld is trying to market itself as a social site like Myspace.com. The social site features are awful, slow and broken. They have live chat too with other members. Helloworld membership is a complete communication solution. There website is closed to general public, since they want to promote the MLM marketing model of the company.

The Bad

Helloworld and First Stream expect to grow fast. They upgraded their version Oct. of 2006, now running version 5.0, an unfortunately a year later it still has bugs that antagonize users randomly. When I submitted complaints, I was always told it was my computer that needed settings changed. Finally after making a long list of my PC setting changes, very frustrating and too complicated for most users. If you are a Helloworld end user paying $9.95-$39.95 per month you need to be very motivated to get through the technical issues. Even after making all the adjustments to my PC I still had the same errors. Later tech support finally admitted it was their system not my computer. I eventually lost interest in the service,  because the system is too slow and malfunctioned everyday. I wonder if technical support are trained to blame the users computers and deflect blame from their system malfunction. Also you can only use Internet Explorer with the Helloworld and First Stream system. No other browsers. Some days their system works great, other days, not at all. An example of the type of bugs are, after you are done using the site, you log off and your Internet Explorer crashes. Closing all windows completely, there are many other errors too, no doubt they are working on them daily. Recently I learned that you can't have McAfee or Norton virus software enabled on you PC or you can't send video mails. So if you want your computer to be secure you can't use their service. Or you need to turn your McAfee or Norton security on and off before and after using the service. Who is going to do that?  After you record your video mail message on the site you must wait a couple of minutes for the video to be processed, before you can do anything else on the site. This slows the process considerably, you wait and wait for your video message to be sent.When I recorded a 2 minute video, I had to wait 2 minutes for the video to upload to their site. The basic $9.95 account allows for a 2 minute recorded video mail. If you pay $39.95 per month you get 4 minute video mail record time. Two minute video recording time is not enough. There are many free videomail accounts you can use that record longer times than two minutes.