Meebo, The Browser-Based Instant Messaging Client

When it comes to instant messaging clients I have a pretty long history behind. The very short version of the story is this - YM -> Trillian -> Pidgin but when I had to upgrade hardware and reinstall Windows or just work on some Linux machine... the only way for me was Meebo. I don't know if you discovered it yet and if you haven't it's going to be my pleasure to tell you a few things about this ever-improving online service! ;)

To be honest I can't remember when I heard about Meebo for the first time and how I managed to find it but one thing that happened a few months after that first encounter made me take a closer look at it. Again I will give you the short version of a longer story especially because the full discussion I had back then contains a lot of dirty words. Why? Here we go...

As you probably know companies like to keep their employees busy. As busy as possible or at least without the chance to do something else than work or improving their work-related skills. As far as I know there aren't many jobs requiring instant messaging knowledge so when it comes to banning websites and programs it's porn grabbing the first place closely followed by Yahoo Messenger.

As you probably imagined already we're talking about a company where the sysadmin wasn't exactly a guru so he considered that disallowing users to install the YM client would solve the problem. Cute but wrong - this is where Meebo enters the scene and the rest of it is already a classic story. :P

When I heard this story from a friend working in the company described above (I am sure plenty of big companies can match the description) I decided to take a closer look at Meebo and so I ended up using it pretty often especially when I wasn't sitting in front of my home computer.

While it started as a Web-based instant messaging client for the YM network (at least that's what I remember to see the first time I checked in way back in late 2005) Meebo is now a fully-featured Ajax-based tool delivering support for YM as I was just saying .NET Messenger Service AIM ICQ MySpaceIM Facebook Chat Google Talk and Jabber but it doesn't stop here - even a version designed for the iPhone arrived and native apps for both the Android mobiles and iPhones are also available!

Using it right away is extremely easy but if you get yourself a Meebo account (for free of course) you'll be able to add all the accounts you may have and access them with the help of a single user name and password. Sweet!

Some things are better to be done than watched or talked about and using Meebo is one of those things. No matter if you're using a Mac a Windows-based PC or one running Linux there's no excuse for you to stay away from Meebo because you will end up needing it one day sooner or later...