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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.
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.
Who pays for IM? It's always been a free add-on service for something else.
Most newer IM services are already Jabber/XMPP (Facebook, LiveJournal, etc). There are only a few "legacy" services that I know of anymore (YIM, AIM, MSN).
Plus, Jabber/XMPP services can connect to these other services through bridge connector plug-ins, though from what I've seen, there's almost no interest in working on them.
... And so it comes to this.
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.
eBuddy is a nice multi-IM client for android.
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
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...
Availability, convenience, you name it. For instance, imagine being in an area where your have no cell phone service and you don't have access to anything but a dumb terminal but you need to communicate with someone. There's always e-mail, perhaps, but being able to jump on a messaging service by visiting a website to talk to someone is an incredibly awesome feature.
Sure, there's facebook chat and gtalk, but we're talking about a conversation we might want to be private. Neither facebook nor google have a good track record there. What's more saddening: Google's buying one of the better services. Time to make a new one or move to one someone else has made for the same reason. I've thought about making a Meebo clone on my vpserver for my personal use (and a guarantee of privacy, etc), but it's not the simplest task in the world. I am quite sad to see this service get extinguished by Google. They're really lining up the horrible headlines lately, bad decision after bad decision. We really need Eric back in the saddle. Larry seems to be a horrible CEO.
I'm quite confident it's Larry Page. A lot of really bad decisions coming from Google lately started after he was named CEO. I don't think that's a coincidence.
Have you tried using an AJAX-ey chat client on a dumb terminal?
My God, man. If there isn't an ncurses interface, at least, then count me out: I'd rather key SMTP commands directly into the recipient's mail server than try to use something like Meebo with a dumb terminal connected to a host running Links or somesuch.
That all said, I do miss ytalk.
(Sorry, but I'm simply very literal today. Yes, it's my fault. No, nothing you say will improve it.)
Kid-proof tablet..