Meebo

PC Magazine - Web Site of the Week: Meebo
REVIEW DATE: 01.02.07

By Brian Heater

Click here to visit Meebo
I've got 15 windows open on my desktop right now. There's Word and Photoshop, both Firefox and Internet Explorer, Outlook and iTunes. What's really pushed me over the edge, however, is having three instant messaging clients running simultaneously, each with its own conversation. Over the years, I've accrued accounts for AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, and ICQ. Most recently, Google chat snuck up on me, via my Gmail account, while I wasn't looking. It's nice knowing that my conversational abilities are held in such high regard, sure, but I don't know how much longer my sanity, productivity, or ancient PC can handle all of this attention. This morning, I logged in to Meebo, and now I've got all of those conversations stashed conveniently away in one of my browser's tabs.

Meebo is an AJAX-heavy, Web-based app that currently supports the top six instant messaging clients—it's a bit like the ever-popular Trillian software but without all the pesky downloading, meaning that you can access your chats on any PC with a compatible Web browser (the app works with both IE and Firefox—Opera users are currently out of luck). Logging in to Meebo, users are prompted to enter their username and password for either AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, or Jabber. A seventh option is the creation of a free Meebo account, allowing users to sign in to any combination of those six services simultaneously.

Once you've logged in, a Buddy List window appears inside the browser, which looks a bit like a shinier, Web 2.0 version of its AIM cousin. The list contains the names of all of your buddies from the various services. Like traditional IM clients, it also features access to your buddies' profiles, away messages, time logged on, and time idle. To the left of each username in the buddy list window is an icon specifying which service the buddy is logged in to. The list is also drag-and-drop editable. Right-clicking items gives you further editing options, such as changing group names. Meebo recently added a pop-up option, which allows you to launch the list as a separate window should your browser prove too confining for your chatting needs.

If you do choose to stay within the confines of your browser window—the route I went, given my aforementioned aversion to windows—your conversations, like the buddy list, appear as windows within the browser. You can drag and drop the AJAX-based conversation bubbles anywhere within the window, or minimize them to the bottom—though the windows have the slightly annoying habit of scrolling halfway back through the conversation, once you return them to normal size. When you receive a new message from a buddy, the meta title across the top of the browser flashes a snippet of the new message—especially convenient for those who choose to keep the conversations going in a background browser tab. You can also enable alert sounds, which will play a non-discreet, monotone chime whenever you send or receive a message.

Another recently added, useful feature allows you to sign in and out of various clients when signed in to your Meebo account. Just because you're logged in to your Yahoo! and Gmail accounts via your Meebo account doesn't mean that you have to be logged in to your AIM account as well. Also, should your browser crash during a conversation—a scenario that has become all too common in my own life, since I attempted to install IE7 on my PC—the last messages in the interrupted conversations will appear in a chat bubble in gray italics, for future review, once you restart the conversation.

On the security end, Meebo encrypts log-in passwords using JavaScript, decrypting the server side with OpenSSL. The site will not collect usernames and passwords for the individual clients unless you opt in to a Meebo account, at which point the service stores the information automatically, in order to log you in.

Not surprisingly, as a third-party application, Meebo lacks some features of other IM clients. For one, you can't send messages to users who are off-line, the way you can with AIM and Yahoo!, and changes in textual style don't always translate across services—nor are all of the service's emoticons visible to users on the other end. As much as you might love Meebo's pirate emoticon, if you send it to a user with AIM, they'll simply receive this: (pirate). It should be noted as well that, because of the service's popularity as a way of getting around organizations that block the downloading of IM clients, an increasing number of libraries, schools, and businesses have devoted a good deal of effort to blocking its use, and Meebo has, in turn, invested a lot in bypassing such blocks.

It may lack some of the features of better-established IM clients, but, between the service's existing features and those that the company continues to add, Meebo is a terrific third-party option for those who like to chat, but don't want all of the downloads—or windows.

Source: Web Site of the Week: Meebo: Full Review - Review by PC Magazine