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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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
Check out http://imo.im/. It has integration of practically every messaging service, as well as a great and android app.
Yeah, I too use imo on my Android. Low battery consumption, works quite well.
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.
I've been using the web-based IMO. It even signs into skype!
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.
I'll second that. I've been using Imo for quite a while now. When I first got an Android device I tried a number of IM clients and eventually settled on Imo. I tried eBuddy for a short time, but it requires that you create an eBuddy account and then add all of your other IM accounts to that. Imo, on the other hand, acts like a normal multi-account client and has you manage your accounts locally with the client and logs into them directly from your phone.
I can see the benefit of the eBuddy method for a device where the network connection can change occasionally and if you really don't want to be caught offline it might be better. But, I would much rather do things locally, and I haven't had any issues with my network connection changing. When it does, Imo seems quite quick about reconnecting.
Imo has a few minor annoyances, such as wasting a tremendous amount of screen area on bars/labels/nothing when in landscape mode, but nothing that keeps me from using it. My biggest complaint has nothing to do with Imo, but rather with AIM. Every time I turn on my PC or laptop, Pidgin will attempt to connect (as it should) and AIM will send a message to both clients complaining that you are logged in twice. There is a link to follow, but I did not find anything there that would let me get rid of this.
Imo did have a rather serious bug that I seemed to hit with regularity where it would start forgetting account details. I normally have five accounts and suddenly there would be only three or four listed. I submitted a bug report and they asked for more info, but I never heard anything more. Fortunately, I found a work around by pressing the logoff button, then logging into one account. This would cause the list to refresh and all accounts would reappear. I haven't had this happen in a while, though, so perhaps it has been fixed.
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"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
Oh yay, yet another account to create. It's not enough that I have accounts for the networks I want to connect to?
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...
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
I see a lot of people write this, but the web version of imo.im doesn't seem close to the quality of Meebo... Meebo was the best multi-protocol web messenger by a huge margin. Then again, with everyone having a phone with a bunch IM capabilities these days, it may not matter. I always used Meebo whenever I wanted to access MSN messenger, which these days is never.
Meebo android client was nice when it launched but they never updated it.
I actually like it that they are stopping the service now, as now they offer a download of your full chat history :), years of conversation coming back. I guess the owners of meebo like their piles of newfound cash from google too.
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.
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.
I'm checking it out, however I can't figure out how the hell I can join chat groups for Jabber. Is there a secret button somewhere hidden in the interface? Thanks!
IM+ and IM+ Pro
MOD THE CHILD UP!
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?
IMO doesn't require you to create an account. You just click on the service you want to use and log in.
What, me worry?
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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