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?

Comments

April fools?

[glassware]

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?

Re:April fools?

[icebike]

The Meebo Bar is a major revenue-generating ad platform. Google most likely bought out Meebo for the ad market (like doubleclick) not the chat functionality.

Really? I doubt all 58 people actively using meebo could generate that much revenue.

Admittedly, I've only been around for some few weeks, but I never heard about meebo till google bought them.
There are so many good multi-protocol messenger clients around for just about any platform you may wish
to run. The only reason to ever use meebo was that it was browser based, but with a cell phone in every
pocket how important is that?

As the first link in the summary suggests, this is probably to bolster Google +, which, by all accounts is
not living up to Google's expectations.