We stumbled across a neat little service the other day which looks like it could be a useful tool for those who enjoy video chats across the Internet, but don’t enjoy the hassle of having to sign up, log in and other nonsense.

Appear.in as the name implies, is a very simple but effective video conferencing system which offers a home for up to 8 people who want to do video chat in real time. The beauty of it lies in its simplicity…just input your room name, copy the auto-created link and send it off to the people you want to conference with.

The video room automatically syncs to your webcam and mic, and the room is created in seconds, after which you simply hang around waiting for your friends, family or colleagues to arrive. We love the fact it’s a matter of seconds to get going. Lovely.

We also love the fact that it’s happily cross-platform, as in our tests we had it running on an Android smartphone using the Chrome browser (Chrome and Firefox browsers are supported). There are other nice touches too, such as the fact you can lock the room, and also make a particular room (i.e. URL) your own.

You can also customize the background of the room, make it full screen (which could be pretty cool on extra huge monitors) and make use of a text chat function when the connections are not 100% working nicely. But overall it’s the fact that it’s so darn easy to get going that impresses us. And of course the fact that it’s free.

Of course one assumes that once there are enough people using the service, prices will have to be added, since hosting video is not cheap, right? But for now, we think this is a great tool. Just to note, it’s clearly early days with the code, because we had to try a couple of times to get it accessing properly, but it did work for us on the 2nd try, which is fine for a new service we think. Definitely a bookmark.