I think that one distinction that needs to be made is that the downloads for the above versions of hearme are different. The service offered at the Hearme.Com to join their chatrooms involves visiting there site and downloading and intalling the program. With pages like mine, when you visit the page and you have not got the neccesary plug in, you are promped to accept an agreement and the plug in is installed for you - it took less than a minute for me to get started.

Although pages like mine are very basic, as Dave has said, they do use the same servers. I am not sure what the full blown chat rooms are like but I would imagine that it involves somebody going there to open a room up wheras the setup I am using is open all the time - ie anybody who has the URL can pop in as and when they please and is not dependent on me starting anything or in my case, even whether my computer is switched on.

To add to the confusion, Hearme does offer a SDK which makes it possible for people to develop more advanced applications to host on their web sites but I think that costs money. I think that this is one of the possibilites that Max is evaluating at the moment.

The only thing I have against hearme is that it has yet to offer Mac support (not to mention ther PC operating systems) but hopefully that will change soon. It works well and has enabled a few of us to get together but I hope whichever way Max decides to go in the future is a little less exclusive than this.

Jon