As a professional blogger there may be many situations where you want a client or a tech support company to connect to your computer to show how to do something, or to make changes in order to fix a problem you’re having. Join.me, at its most basic level, is free, flash-enabled screen-sharing software.  It allows a Presenter to make a quick connection with a Viewer(s) to permit screen-sharing.

The basic free app makes collaboration a breeze; setting up conference calls is incredibly quick, with no sign-up required. The presenter simply heads to the join.me site and hits the “Share” button to start their conference. The join.me application will download and run automatically. The presenter is then given a unique join.me URL that can be sent to everyone invited to participate in the conference. Even the URL is easy to remember and it makes perfect sense when you consider that this is a screen sharing / free conference call tool.

The most useful feature of Join.me is that you can let one participant at a time control your screen. To share control, click the mouse button and then select a viewer. You can still control your own screen.

To connect to someone’s screen, go to join.me and then Type their 9 digit number into the join box and Press Enter.  There is no download, it just opens up in your browser. When viewing someone else’s screen join.me is entirely reliant on only your web browser. It even supports browser zoom, so you can make it as big or small as you like within your window.

Other features of Join.me

• Chat – You can send private messages to specific people or can send message to all participants. This is a really useful feature.
• Pause –  The presenter can pauses the screen in case he needs to do something on his computer the others don’t need to see
• File Exchange –  The presenter can share a file with the group

What I don’t like about Join.me

No Recording feature – One of the benefits of having an online meeting is the ability to record the session. Unfortunately, Join.Me doesn’t offer this feature yet. But other web conferencing services like GoToMeeting (it is a paid service) allow you to record the meeting right to your desktop.

Weak security – In the free version of Join.me anybody can join any meeting. All they need is the 9 digit code to join. But in the PRO version it has a “lock” feature. When locked the viewers have to knock to enter. You can decide who can join.

Despite these few disadvantages Join.me is a very useful tool and it will make your online collaboration a lot easier. If you haven’t tried this service yet, then you should.