Meebo Introduces Community Instant Messaging
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After Facebook added ‘Chat’ as one of the features of the site in April,  the feature was quickly welcomed by the members. However, this made the other social networking sites scramble into ‘think-think-think’ mode, since none of them had this feature.
Apparently, 3 months after facebook’s announcement, Seth Sternberg, CEO, Meebo whom we interviewed last year, has stepped forward to help the other sites in distress. Apparently, Meebo has announced a ‘Community IM’ feature with a select few partner sites. This products lets the members of the partner sites to chat instantaneously with each other. An important aspect of this product by Meebo is that it is a ‘federated system’. This basically allows a member of Site 1 to chat with his friend who is a member of Site 2, since Meebo’s product is independent of the sites. DanceJam, Flixster, myYearbook, Nickelodeon/MTVN Kids and Family Group’s AddictingGames, Piczo, SparkArt, Sugar Publishing and Tagged are currently the only sites supporting the product.
Interestingly, as can be seen in the screenshot above, the product User Interface (UI) bears a striking resemblance to the Facebook chat UI. The chat can be used from the bottom right of the site, or it can be popped out to be used as a separate window, if you wish to close the site.
Meebo is currently offering this service free of cost to the site. However, in return, Meebo places ads, the revenue from which is split 50-50.
With signs of all the instant messaging services integrating with each other, it has endangered the core service of Meebo - Multi protocol instant messaging. If the IM services integrate with each other, anyone with any of the chat clients can chat with a user on any of the other services. This leaves Meebo with users who only don’t have access to installing apps on their computer.
Such a move Meebo is an effort to slightly drift from their core service and trying to explore new horizons onto the World Wide Web.
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Well it would be wrong to say other social nets do not have IM or chat. Indyarocks.com is one of the social nets which has an IM and Chat feature.
However, what Meebo provides is much superior chat experience compared to facebook or Indyarocks as meebo aggregates users from across different IMs.
But there is one issue Meebo does face. Meebo is blocked in atleast 60% of the corporate networks. which means Meebo based chat function of an unblocked site might not work in some networks.