Reviewing Meebo November 27, 2005
Posted by Gary Slinger in : Technology , trackbackMeebo – a web based instant messaging application, supporting the major IM platforms – MS Instant Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger or ICQ, Jabber or GTalk, or Yahoo! Messenger.
Instant Messaging – it’s not just for kids anymore, and hasn’t been for a long-time. It’s in daily use by millions of folks, using it professionally and personally. One of the everlasting issues, however, is that unlike email, where it doesn’t matter what client you use, it very much matters what IM client you use – the major networks don’t talk to each other. There’s an “open” network out there (Jabber), but it doesn’t talk to the “Big 3” commercial systems. So, you can see there’s an issue.
As a solution, you could, for instance, use GAIM. Multi-platform, open-source, and all that good stuff. Or, you could use Trillian – there’s a free version and a pay-for pro-version, which is my personal choice of IM client and has been for some years. Both of these solutions, however, rely on you being able to download and/or install software on your PC. That’s not always an option – think internet café, work computer, or computer somewhere you just happen to be grabbing internet access, such as a friends computer (who may well already be logged into the IM networks, thus preventing you logging in under your own credentials).
Enter Meebo. Officially launched beyond “friends and family” as they put it on their site only a few days ago, and already revised more than once as a result of the public feedback and commentary, Meebo is an AJAX web-application, offering substantial IM communications, through a regular web-interface.
Find it at http://www.meebo.com
Read their blog at http://blog.meebo.com
Download it from – you don’t. That’s part of the point 
Go to the website (www.meebo.com), and you’ll be redirected to one of their host servers. The sign-on screen is shown below:
At the bottom of the sign-on screen, you’ll see “Passwords encrypted with 1024-bit RSA keys. Copyright 2005 Meebo, Inc. All rights reserved.”. There’s a page at http://blog.meebo.com/?page_id=25 that talks about their security. For the sake of clarity and the paranoid – be aware that using this service, yes, the folks at Meebo are getting your password(s), and could record it if they wanted, and that in turn could be exposed if the database was cracked, released or sold. Security is one of those areas where there’s a lot of “if’s, but’s and maybe’s”. You pay’s your money and you takes your chances. Decide for yourself whether the risk is worth the potential reward.
After you’ve signed in to one of more of the services shown above, we get to the meat of the matter:
This is showing the latest entry from the Meebo blog, an AOL system message (because I was already logged in to AIM on my other PC, and Meebo/AIM correctly identified this, and allowed me to log my other session off), and an obscured message window where I was testing a message through to an MSIM contact.
When a message window is open, you get the “[contact name] is online” or “[contact name] is typing” notifications that we’ve come to know and expect; when I had a different window selected, and a message came in from a contact, the Start-Bar button flashed, and alternated text of the contact name, and the first few words of the message they had typed. That was a nice feature. Tab back to the Meebo window, and the interior window with the message itself has its title bar flashing.
You can logon to a message service once you’ve started the Meebo page – the buttons are at the bottom of the buddy list, bottom right of the screen in the example shot above. Or you could log out of a specific service if you so desired.
The service is openly “Alpha”, and a work in progress. There are a substantial number of “missing features” – and I quote that because, depending on your point of view, they’re not necessarily missing. But, to be clear, at the moment there’s no file transfer, no video or voice communications. This is Instant Messaging, old-school style – you can type, and that’s it. But sometimes – that’s all you want. If you’re somewhere you can’t download and/or install a client, for whatever reason, this is an application that may work for you. Back at home, perhaps the native application, GAIM, or Trillian is more appropriate. Borrowing a computer somewhere – this is definitely an application to be aware of.
My personal want list? Skype integration, for the text instant messaging at least.
Now… the “other side”. The Corporate Security side. I can see this being blocked, deliberately, a lot of places. I don’t know if Meebo has found its way yet into the databases of Websense and the like, but I’m sure it will do in due course. If you manage to get an IM client installed on your desktop, it can “disguise” its traffic and communicate over port 80 (HTTP) or 443 (SSL), which puts you in a position of having to use port-filtering appliances to block the traffic. An application like Meebo relies on a specific website, which is nominally easier to block, although there are “ways around” that, too. At a minimum, *.meebo.com is a target for blocking, as the web servers are www2., www3., etc. I wonder how long it’ll be before someone finds an easy workaround to this…
My advice on the above? If you’re somewhere where Meebo is blocked, be it school or work, accept that, and/or make a written case for the communication benefits of IM to the appropriate “authorities”. There are plenty of studies on the various aspects of communication out there on the internet. Pitch, for instance, that you want the text IM, rather than the file-transfer option (which causes security concerns) or the voice/video functions (which causes bandwidth concerns). See where that gets you.
But for the internet café, somewhere you’re just popping into to check mail and such – here’s a nice, new option for checking IM as well, and I wish Meebo every success.
technorati tags: IM, Technology, Web 2.0, AJAX
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