meebo alpha - Unified Instant Messenging

Two months back, if you tried to start a group chat with me on MSN Messenger, it would have failed. In fact, if you tried to send me a file or “nudge” me today on MSN, all you’d see is a failure message. Yep, that’s because /me was and still is using meebo - a web service that acts as a one-stop web-client for all the instant messenging (IM) services you use, e.g. AOL/ICQ, Jabber/GTalkwa, MSN Messenger, etc.

As you would have noticed from my first couple of sentences, meebo isn’t perfect… yet. But for a web service in the alpha stage, it already does a remarkable job. It allows you to login to individual IM services or login to multiple IM services simultaneously. And if you choose to register for a meebo account, logging in that account will automatically login to all IM services of your choice. This is something more specialised web clients like MSN Web Messenger and AIM Express cannot do (heck, both even require you to have browser pop-ups switched on… eeks).

Yes, desktop IM clients like GAIM could do this ages ago, but can you access them while using a foreign PC on a cybercafe thousands of miles away from your home? No? I thought so. On a related note, it’s also one of the few ways you’d be able to connect to an IM service if you’re on a restricted school or office computer with no IM client installed (and no admin privileges to install any either). And if your school has blocked the meebo site completely, there’s even a meebo repeater to help you with that.

But those aren’t the only advantages of using meebo. Why I use it even when I’m at home is because it saves me from having yet another icon on my taskbar, and from the pain of having pop-ups for every conversation (you can configure this away, but not all desktop clients allow you to do that). There’s also a chat log system that saves a transcript of all your chat sessions. I’m not sure how large your transcripts can be before they start truncating them though.

Of course, there’s still a lot of features I’d like to see in meebo. File transfer support and group management are probably the two at the top of my list. Optional password prompting when accessing chat logs would be nice as well. But even with these deficiencies, I’m staunchly a meebo fan. You can point to eBuddy or Kool IM, but I found them clunky in comparison to meebo.

Overall, I feel meebo would be a great addition to the arsenals of web-focused individuals (if you spend most of your time on your PC online, this is what you are). Besides the fact that there’s really no reason to install a desktop IM client when a simple tab in your browser of choice running meebo can do the same job, you are provided increased mobility from being able to use any PC connected to the web for IM-ing with ease.