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While tax season is always a scramble, one of the best perks of being self-employed is the fact that you can generally arrive to the office / living room in your pajamas. Think about all the blogs you read on a regular basis. Now imagine those people in their underwear, because that's honestly how the foremost technology bloggers are dressed as they deliver you the latest news. But video chat threatens to unsettle this wonderful world of pants-less utopia. This past weekend, Google announced the launch of iGoogle voice and video chat.

We first reviewed TinyChat when it was just a text chat with Twitter integration. Since then, though, TinyChat has morphed into a full-blown online video conferencing system with features like screen sharing, video recording, and Facebook integration. These days, as more and more video services offer integration with Twitter, TinyChat has been under some pressure to stay ahead of the competition like camtweet and Twitcam. In response to the increased competition, TinyChat just released a new and improved version of its service. This new version offers a number of interesting new features, including a push to talk mode and more options to manage a room for room starters. In addition, the video resolution and frame rate have also been doubled in the free version.

When you hear the name Seesmic today, chances are that you are thinking about a Twitter client, but once upon a time, Seesmic was a much-hyped online "video conversation" service. Now, however, after a recent redesign, the Seesmic homepage basically doesn't mention the video service anymore and the video service has moved to its own subdomain. In a new video, Seesmic founder, Loic Le Meur, reveals that Seesmic's video conversation site hasn't seen any growth in the last couple of months and that Seesmic plans to focus on its Twitter client in order to give Seesmic, the company, a chance to survive.

A few months ago, we reviewed Tinychat, an easy to use web app for creating on-demand chatrooms with close connections to Twitter. Today, Tinychat relaunches with a number of very cool features, including video chats with up to 12 people, recording, screen sharing, and a Facebook application for video chats on Facebook. The new version of Tinychat keeps a lot of the features that we liked in the text-only version (no need to sign up, very easy to use, vanity room names), and adds the new video features on top of that.