Meebo: Chat Everywhere Online

Meebo is a web service that allows you to sign-in to your instant message account through the web browser, rather than launching the chat application from your operating system. Various chat applications are AIM, iChat, or Trillian (to name a few).

The nice thing about Meebo is that you can combine all of your chat accounts in one place. This is very useful.

Currently Meebo supports chat accounts from AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, Jabber, GTalk, and MSN.

On Windows, AIM has become a haven for advertisements, which scream out at you when you least want them to. AIM also has a big limitation - you can’t save chat conversations, for future reference.

When I found Meebo, I instantly wanted to try it, because I was so tired of AIM windows popping up on my screen, while I was trying to work in another program. Meebo sits comfortably in the web browser, and humbly provides an alert in the title of the page, which means I can get to it, when I get to it. No intrusive pop-ups invading my screen.

Most importantly, all of my chat accounts are “accessible” in a single location.

Meebo’s strengths

Simplicity

Meebo excels in simplicity. There are currently no advertisements, and the interface is uncluttered and clean. There are also only a few preference settings:

Only a few preferences in Meebo

Graphics

Chat windows are very impressive

Chat windows appear as they do in Windows, and can be moved around, expanded, minimized, maximized, and closed in the same manner. It’s almost like you’re using a regular desktop application, except you can’t drag the windows around inside the browser window.

Chat logs

Meebo recently included “chat logs” as a feature, meaning you can save all of your conversations. Many other chat programs already do this. However at the time of this writing, the most popular chat program of all – AIM, still does not offer this feature.

Chat Logs are kept for every conversation

It’s always handy to have your conversations archived for future reference. Sometimes I forget a web page or phone number that a friend mentioned to me over chat, and with archives, I can always go back and find it.

Group chat

“Group chat” is a feature recently added to Meebo. This allows for “chat rooms:”

You can chat with more than one person with Group Chat

Multiple chat accounts

By far the most useful feature (and selling point) of Meebo is that you can include all of your chat accounts in one place. There is to date, no other software that does this.

With many new chat programs being released - it’s nice to have a single location to access them all.

Meebo’s limitations

Meebo has some limitations, and depending on how you look at it – the limitations could be good or bad.

Lack of customization

Many chat “power users” may not like Meebo for it’s lack of customization options. Meebo will be introducing new features over time, like user preferences, but right now things are very simple.

Entering information twice

When you setup your Meebo chat accounts, you can set whether or not an account will “connect at startup.” You can also have certain accounts “sign on” as invisible:

The problem is… if you have a certain account “disabled” at startup (in other words, it doesn’t connect at startup), and wish to sign onto that account later, you have to manually enter the screen name and password. For some reason, it’s not saved, even though it is in your preferences:

Why do I have to enter my information again if it’s already saved in my account?

Lack of visual alerts

I personally can’t stand instant messages popping up on my screen, however some people need to be alerted immediately of new messages. Meebo provides audio alerts, but nothing visual.

Meebo sits quietly in your browser, and only issues a “title alert,” which is in the browsers’ title bar. But if you have a lot of tabs open in Firefox, you’ll hardly notice the new message.

Since Meebo runs solely in the browser, it’d be difficult to come up with a quick way to provide alerts at the OS level. If this feature does come out, users will at least have to download some kind of “Meebo extension,” or “plug-in,” which would sit on your OS, and alert you in a more obvious manner.

Overall

Meebo fits a niche of users who like an alternative to the over-powering AIM software - full of ads and intrusive pop-ups.

Meebo is growing. New features and preferences are added frequently. Meebo has an active group of developers, who are easy to contact, and are open to new features and fixing bugs.

It is my guess that Meebo will soon be leading the industry of chat software, simply because people are tired of downloading and installing chat software on every local computer that they use. With Meebo, it’s just a browser away.