Meebo
From LIS 460 Summer 2007
Meebo is a web-based chat service which offers both access to a variety of other chat programs (AIM, Y!M, GoogleTalk, ICQ, Jabber and MSN) and "Meebo Rooms" which are multi-user chat windows with set discussion topics.
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What is Meebo?
Meebo.com was launched in 2005. The company is based in Mountain View, CA and employs roughly sixteen full time staff and a variable number of interns[1]. Meebo has been mentioned by many news sources (PC World, Mashable, BBC News and the New York Times for example) as an excellent web tool and a useful site[2].
The site offers a single portal through which users can log in to multiple instant messaging accounts at one time in one window. Contacts for all logged in accounts display in a single list with symbols next to each name denoting the service they are logged into.
Users can send messages to anyone on any of their logged in contact lists as well as receive messages from the same contacts. Users can also open group chats with users from multiple services as well as create Meebo Rooms which remain in existence on the site regardless of whether anyone is in them or not. Rooms can be either public or private with the private ones requiring a password.
The site is still growing with new features still being built and existing features being tweaked regularly[3].
Advantages
- The main purpose of Meebo is as a portal to various instant messaging services but it also serves as an instant messaging service itself with the inclusion of group chats and Meebo Rooms.
- The ability to log into multiple services from a single portal with no additional software to download or run is very advantageous when multiple people have access to a single computer - public internet computers in a public library or internet computers in a media center, for example.
- Communicating with users from multiple services in group chats is advantageous for users who do not wish to make an account for every single service. In essence it greatly broadens the possibilities for communication.
- Users can log in with a single account from one of the given choices or they can log in with multiple accounts at the same time. Users can also easily create a Meebo account which will save account information for multiple logins on multiple services. Users can also assign auto-logins to specific accounts which will log on when the user logs onto his/her Meebo account. This makes keeping track of accounts and passwords quite easy.
- The availability of Meebo Rooms is not limited to people who are already acquainted or using the same service. Rooms can be created for a single subject, library science for example, and made public for any Meebo users interested in that subject, allowing for further social networking.
- A relatively new function, Meebo Me, creates a widget which can be embedded into a user's website/blog/MySpace/etc. allowing users looking at that site to send a message to the Meebo user if he/she is logged into Meebo at the time. Meebo Rooms can also be embedded into a webpage, allowing even non-Meebo users to participate.
Disadvantages
- Due to the various protocols Meebo must pass to allow logins to the different services it offers access to there will, inevitably, be errors. In some cases, due perhaps to a lack of specific information from the service the error originated from, the errors given by Meebo to the user are unclear or difficult to understand. An example is an error message claiming a password is incorrect when the password is not incorrect simply because that is likely the most common problem resulting in a failed login.
- The help page is more an information page about the service than a troubleshooting guide in the event of errors.
- Logging chats and conversations occurs automatically but does not save automatically. This is mitigated by a warning that pops up when the user attempts to leave the site without saving logs but the actual process is not well explained.
- Firewalls and filters which block chat programs such as AIM and Y!M may also block Meebo from accessing them, which is probably the point anyhow.
- Creating a room is slightly misleading in that the process to create one leads automatically to the creation of code for an embedded widget for the room, not to the room itself.
