Meebo Woes
Jun 8th, 2007 by Karen
So for the Social Software Showcase, my collaborators and I setup a Meebo room. The only problem is that I don’t use Meebo. Why you might ask? You can log into it from almost any computer. It doesn’t need to be installed. You can log into multiple accounts. You can create a chat box with Meebo Me at you can embed into your website. So with all these pluses why don’t I use Meebo?
Well, one reason is that I take my laptop with me most places. I can’t stand to be without it. As a result, I use Fire (a multi-protocol chat client) to do my chatting. Another reason I don’t use Meebo is that it isn’t very smart with how it handles buddies. It won’t compress different user accounts that belong to the same person. As a result, my Meebo window is a mess with lots of different buddies. Some of whom I don’t know who they are because it lists them under their username not their actual name. I also like to use Fire for IRC, in particular the code4lib channel.
That doesn’t mean that my chat client is perfect though. It has some downsides of its own. One is that I can’t video chat with it. Another is I can’t access Meebo rooms (this is a relatively new downside). Perhaps as Meebo develops it will allow people to connect to Meebo rooms to use another client. In the meantime, I’ll have to go back and forth between my chat client and Meebo.
“Some of whom I don’t know who they are because it lists them under their username not their actual name.”
FYI–You can right click on each of your buddies in Meebo and rename them with whatever you want. It remembers the changes each time/place you log in.
Meebo shares a problem with the Yahoo Messenger for Macintosh: no log files on the local hard disk. After downloading the newest (ha ha …) YM for Mac a few month ago I was stunned to see this important feature still missing while present in the YM Windows version.
Even if the development of Fire has come to an end I still use it as my main messenger due to its logging features and its clutter free UI. And I still like it to have access to my chat logs when being en-route where no online access is possible or affordable.
Maybe Meebo will solve this problem in the nearer future but I hope that the Adium guys will fix their Fire log import issues before Fire gets broken by the next protocol change.