Meebo – An Integrated Web Based Instant Messenger

Posted on Apr 14, 2009 in Productivity, Test Drive Apps by dee 0 Comments

Admit it.. practically everyone is on either MSN, Yahoo, or the million other IM clients out there. Every IM demands that you install their full clients to make best use of their capabilities. Having to juggle all these applications can become painful quickly especially if you have many contacts spread over these applications.

There are also clients out there that try and integrate different clients into one package (a la Pidgin and Trillian). Meebo is another one of them integrated instant messenger applications, but its main feature is its web based and so you don’t need to install yet another application just to make use of its features.

Meebo offers the following features on its website:

• As an IM Client, it allows the user to connect to MSN, Yahoo!, MySpace, AIM, Facebook, Gtalk, ICQ, Jabber, Flixster and more. That’s a whole lot of clients :)
• It provides a “meeting room” type functionality a la chat rooms
• It enables integrated live communications on any websites that incorporate Meebo Rooms and IM.
• It’s web based, so no application downloads or installation is required.
• It does offer notification services to allow messages to pop up without going through a browser as well as mobile chatting facilities.

To start, you need (yes, you guessed it) an account on Meebo.

Step 1 – Open up your favourite web browser and navigate to http://www.meebo.com. The left box will ask you for your Meebo user name and password. As this is your first time, there is a link called “Sign up now!” that you need to click. When clicked it opens up a small window that you can fill in to complete your user registration.

On the third screen of the registration wizard, you’ll be offered an opportunity to enter your MSN, Yahoo!, AIM or GTalk account details. You can skip this step as we will add our accounts in a later step. So Click on SKIP and Meebo will now continue and create your user account for you.

 

Step 2 – Once you have logged in, you’ll see the following screen. This is the main dashboard of Meebo. You can see your username, status and profile picture on the left. On the right is your current buddy list and at the bottom is some advertising.

Lets sign onto some accounts now. So click on “+Sign onto more accounts…” link button.

 

 

Step 3 – A small window will pop up with some basic questions. See the screenshot on the left. Basically, choose which IM network you want to connect to and enter the login credentials for that IM network. Note: This is different from your Meebo account details.

Signing onto some of the IM networks may require more than one step (eg Facebook has about 3 or 4 in its wizard).

 

 

 

Step 4 – Once you have added the service, it will appear in your dashboard.

If you have chosen to untick the “Connect at startup” option, you’ll have to manually sign on to the services. You do this by clicking on your name against the chosen IM network and it should expand down one line with a “Sign on” link. Click on this link to actually log on. This way you can selectively log onto just the services you want.

It can take a bit of getting used to the web based Dashboard, so I would suggest trying with a couple of your IM networks first and once you get used to it, then continue to add more.

The Buddy List is in integrated one, so you get to see all your contacts from all your signed on IM networks in one place. From this point on, chatting with someone is as simple as double clicking their name to open a chat window and chatting as usual.

There are many things you can do with Meebo, and I’ve merely scratched the surface to get you started. You have the usual webcam, group chat and online game functionality similar to what’s provided on the individual clients.

Additionally, you can click on the Meebo Rooms link on the top of the screen to create a group chat or join an existing one. Though I must admit, the content in some of these rooms can get quite immature :)

 

 

In conclusion, Meebo is a well rounded integrated product that allows you to access your IM networks without having to install IM Clients. This is particularly good where you may not be allowed to install the various IM applications. Meebo also offers notification services that you can install on your desktop to allow you to use its functionalities outside of the browser. It even has a service called repeater to allow for Meebo use where IM access may be restricted.

The website has excellent descriptions of its various services, so I suggest you go to the Meebo website and explore the various products. One of the more fascinating pages I went to while exploring their blog was their “map” page. It showed all the IM conversations happening in the last 15 minutes. Always good to pop onto that page at various times of the day to see where the hotspots are :)

 
Having been around since 2005, Meebo has matured to a range of products and services and can be safely used without significant risk to user security.

Tags: Cool Apps, IM Clients, Meebo, Productivity, Test Drive, Test Drive Apps