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Meebo Discontinuing All Services Except for Meebo Bar
An anonymous reader writes with news of Meebo's fate, a mere six days after being acquired by Google. From the article: "Meebo, which began in 2005 as a browser based instant messaging program, will now cease most of its services by next month. The IM service supported various IM platforms such as Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AIM, ICQ, MySpaceIM, Facebook Chat, Google Talk, CafeMom and others."
Their cash cow, the Meebo bar, will "...continue to be available to site publishers and will see continued improvements and new features in the weeks and months ahead." With Meebo killing off their messenger, are there any good Android chat alternatives that aren't tied to Google Talk?
I wonder what the motivation behind this is... is it to take a competitor out of the road? Or maybe it's more bening, such as gaining qualified employees?
Wow, first read I had to look at the date.
Meebo Bar is like a total perversion of everything they once did well. I used to love using Meebo since it provided a centralized place to track all my conversations. But when I started seeing the Meebo Bar appear elsewhere I ditched them. Who knew they'd all of a sudden be acquired just to obtain control of something horrible like this?
Imo.im is actually a better solution for multi-service instant messaging on Android than Meebo,
imo.im
Time to move over to imo.im
http://www.xabber.com/
XMPP (Jabber) client with multi-account support.
Check out http://imo.im/. It has integration of practically every messaging service, as well as a great and android app.
Couldn't Apple (or gag Facebook) buy and maintain the IM thing for $1?
Yep, same here....
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It would be nice if EVERYONE switched over to open jabber servers. Get off all these proprietary services.
But then, who would pay for the server loads? Server resource and network bandwidth isn't exactly free.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Google Talk on android sucks too, messages may come in upto 15 minutes late or not at all, especially if you have a web gmail open somewhere with gtalk embedded. Meebo is a good fix for that too. The best I had found in alternate IM's for the phone. It is fast, light, and works, even on my low end phone.
Any slashdotters know of other LIGHT and SNAPPY, android IM clients that support Yahoo and G Talk?
Silence is a state of mime.
Duh.... duh.... duh.... where's teh innovation?!?!?!
They're perhaps a little nicer about their acquisitions than Microsoft.
Still, it's quite annoying. I now have five years of chat logs that differ slightly from the pidgin html format. There's an abandoned conversion program, but it lacks a makefile and I'm not keen on figuring out how to get it to compile. If anyone else is working on the same problem please do let me know.
The whole affair makes me really wary about switching to another online chat program, but rolling my own equivalent service seems a bit complex. For the moment I'm symlinking pidgin's history files to my dropbox account, which is probably going to be a viable solution if I feel like installing Pidgin and Dropbox on every computer I want to chat on, or perhaps carry portable versions on a thumb drive. It's too bad meebo isn't an open source project, maybe google can do us that favor.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
It's bad enough every app in the world wants to install a toolbar in my browser. Now every web page in the world want's to add a bunch of garbage tool bars that I can't get rid of unless I completely disable javascript. Web page toolbars have got to be one of the most annoying things web designers have cast upon us.
SFGate started using it a few weeks ago, and I absolutely hate it! It pops up and obscures content, loads flash, and all around just sucks.
Well, that sucks. Meebo has been my go-to site to sign in to IM on when I'm not at my own computer. Time to strike it from my list, I guess.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
and connects with the IM+ mobile apps.
I've been using Steam and Google+ almost to the point of eliminating text messaging entirely. Both are free and cross platform. Why even bother with single purpose protocols like MSN/AIM/ICQ/Y!Messenger?
Hmm, chat alternatives on a phone. Have you tried voice?
I used to use Meebo on the desktop, but when I got Android I was surprised by just how bad Meebo's Android app was, so I stopped using it. Since then I've been using ebuddy, whose Android app is quite nice actually. The major downside to ebuddy is that they set your status message on every account to an advertisement for ebuddy without you necessarily knowing about it.
Some friends of mine recommended Trillian for Android. I tried it, and it works relatively well, though I still prefer ebuddy. Multi client on Android is not an ideal situation. If you can stick to one messenger and don't need multi client, then use that messenger's native app. Both Yahoo and AIM have revamped Android apps that a big improvements in efficiency and usability on mobile. Also, you can double up on messengers--use the Talk app to chat with AIM buddies, and use the Yahoo app to chat with MSN buddies (I assume the MSN/Yahoo bridge works on the mobile app). I do not like the MSN apps for Android.
Most of my IM activity has been replaced by Facebook Messenger. On Android I rely mostly on Talk and Facebook for important stuff, and any other apps are just for fun. I also use Whatsapp.
If you are just looking for XMPP, it has been mentioned in this discussion that Xabber is the way to go. I've experimented with every XMPP client I could find on Android, and Xabber is by far the best. Red Solutions also seems to be a communist-friendly company, which is a bonus for those of us on the left, although right wingers are more than welcome to use Xabber as well.
Trillian
I've been using the web-based IMO. It even signs into skype!
I'm sorry, but any way to slice it, that's just a straight up anti-competitive move.
I don't use Meebo, or much care about it, but Google is *clearly* using their might and cash to eliminate services. I can't decide whether it's Google trying to squash tools that marginalize the difference between competing products, thus eliminating any advantages one IM protocol has over another, or they are just trying to remove products from the landscape and further promote the mono-culture they have pushed so very hard.
Android is an utter pile of garbage, having used both Blackberry and Danger, it is a sorry second, but because Google has pushed it so hard, we live in a mono-culture of Android vs iDevice. It's been years, and Android still can't do things in a sane and successful manner, they seem to feel that going against intuition is the best way to innovate. Eliminating well understood UI concepts and relying on quirky interfaces. Apple just confounds me with the "let's take everything out that could possibly add power or confuse", and thus you are left with the "dumb" smart device.
Why does everyone agree with me when I complain about my phone, but we don't have the tools available to make our own good phones? I WANT SEND and END BUTTONS!
I'm excited to find out that Motorola has a semi-native Debian distro hiding under Android on their phones, which is only exposed via webtop. At least it's something?!
Sorry for the OT Rant, but I can't help but go on a tangent once in a while.
eBuddy is a nice multi-IM client for android.
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
I honestly had no idea that people still "instant messaged" each other. What's the point? Why not send a text via a cell phone?
I don't respond to AC's.
there are nuff IRC-Apps and they work great!
adblock plus + element hiding helper = your solution. noscript is useful as well.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I'm sorry, what connects with them? I don't see anything relevant in your message body.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
... because everyone else uses them and won't switch to something else?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
While I normally have no need for Meebo since I typically use Pidgin on a standard desktop machine, their Web-based instant messenger is very useful on systems that don't have a decent multi-protocol instant messaging client. It's also nice because it doesn't need to be installed. Hell, I didn't even know until relatively recently that Meebo even *had* anything besides their Web IM client. And now, since they've been bought out by Google, they're *already* killing off their instant messenger? WTF? And they're spinning it like it's such great news and that they're looking forward to the future. What is this "future" they speak of? A future in which Meebo ceases to exist, as all of their features are stripped away and moved into Google services? Oooh, very exciting.
Oh well... Meebo is officially dead now.
Fuck it. Be evil. Pay's better!
I've been happy with Trillian.
http://www.trillian.im/android/
Out of the keyboards of ACs .... this is actually a reasonable question. It's as though teh internets have become a zero-sum game, just at the same time as the "real" economy has. Some thought required here.
Where is it? When's the happy hour?
What the hell are google thinking?
Google really should copy Apple's imessage system - we need some kind of way to contact other Android users, for free (besides chat) - it should default to a replacement or seamless app like the iphone.
I loathe apple but I have to give credit where credit is due.
These meebo folk could've helped on creating Googles all in one messaging solution that works on the desktop or mobile - putting the meebo team to Google plus is a waste
Pretty much every chat service out there has an XMPP gateway one can utilize. I have an account with http://www.hosted.im/ that uses its own set of gateways for AIM, MSN, Facebook Chat. (Because it's XMPP based, you can add GTalk contacts directly to your hosted.im account without an additional connector.) When you sign into your single account, all the other accounts get signed into as well and you have an auto-aggregated list of all your online contacts.
TL;DR: One account, one tiny program, connects to all your services and the load of running them all is on the server, not your phone. Xabber is a great little program for this purpose.
The bar sucked, and I think most people used it for the chat. However I think they gave up on trying to support it as it kept getting worse until it stopped being improved. It had some glitches, facebook chat didnt work anymore, and my biggest gripe - the app for android blew because it didnt let you log in with the same account, total fail.
Gibberbot is a great XMPP/Jabber client for Android that supports OTR messaging.
Has a free version, does ICQ,AIM,GTalk,Facebook,MSN,Yahoo (Yahoo implementation is a little buggy for me, but YMMV), and its own protocol "Bump". The paid version is $5, no ads, Skype support, etc. Both versions do push messaging, simple and clean interface. Highly recommend.
IM+ and IM+ Pro
MOD THE CHILD UP!
meebo was great because _all_ of the IM traffic was encrypted unlike trillian (only encrypts a few protocols) and most other competitors which encrypt only a few particular protocols (or it is already encrypted for them).
I'm a meebo user, and this sucks. For various reasons, i pretty much need a web chat client for big chunks of my day.
I liked meebo because the UI is small and gets out of my way most of the time. eBuddy is big and intrusive, any others?
I use to use Trillian years ago and loved it. They have an android app. I'd suggest that.
Gibberbot is an XMPP/Jabber client for Android that also supports OTR messaging.
A lot of libraries use Meebo chat embedded in their website to provide reference services-particularly because it was free and thus fit their budget. It required nothing extra on the users' end. Now what will they use?
Thank you! Now none of the rest of us have to deal with Meebo Bar.
Now if only we can figure out who accidentally the whole Meebo, we can get it back...
I would say it is highly probable that in the next 3 months or so, the web based google talk, will be adding MSN, facebook and other IM compatibilities
But why the hell acquiring Meebo for that?!
The support for multiple chat networks is done thanks to Pidgin's LibPurple (also used in Adium, HP/Palm's WebOS, etc.) which is already open source.
Google could already use it if they want multi-protocol support.
What the meebo people did is develop their wonderful web interface (a complete window manager in AJAX) bringing an almost desktop-application-like experience on web browsers (which in itself is impressive). But the multi-protocole support wasn't their work.
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