Ever been on a buddy’s computer, at work or just in a very low-tech situation? Yet you still want to chat with your friends on your IM service of choice, or perhaps even chat with friends across all the popular IM services at the same time!? Well Meebo is a cool app that I found that will let you do just that.
It’s entirely web-based so it requires no download. All you have to do is go to the homepage and sign in. It will then detect your current friends on what ever service you decide to use and you can start chatting to them using the messaging window (which is basic but what do you expect?).
It supports several IM services such as MSN, GTalk, AIM and Yahoo IM. And it’s not only for instant messaging. Meebo also carries some of the popular social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace.
When you’re actually using it everything is simple and easy to use. It’s no problem at all to get to grips with – which is handy seeing as you’ll likely only use it a few times as a back-up. To summarise, a great web app that will come in handy for the power user but I fear a little outdated for most situations given the amount of mobile tech we have.
It has been reported around the web yesterday evening that Meebo has partnered with Joost to provide Chat solutions.
Joost has chosen Meebo as the provider of chat solution on its IPTV service, but I really dont see the point and how this is going to enhance the user experience on Joost. When users log onto IPTV services they do so for the one reason of watch TV shows Free, not to chat to their friends. If they did use the service to chat to their friends how are they going to see what is on the TV, because although it is transparent to some degree, it is still going to be annoying. Thus if you wanted to run both at the same time why not just minimise the Joost service and run Meebo or another chat client in another window. Overlays just dont work!
Web Chat Startup eBuddy, who are currently in competition with Meebo, just added support for Myspace instant messaging.
eBuddy now supports MySpace IM, AOL, ICQ, GoogleTalk, MSN and Yahoo. Log in to some of all of these services from the eBuddy home page.
MySpace says they now have over 18.5 million users of the service, which soft launched in September 2006. By comparison, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM have 224 million, 93 million, 30 million and 30 million users, respectively (Comscore worldwide – July 2007). GTalk trails the rest, with just 4.8 million users.
