I love Meebo Me too...

Main Meebo window using my meebo bee widget

Whenever I find myself dusting off my "I wonder if I can...." syndrome I generally find myself in very hot water that can take hours, if not days, to unravel, and from where I sit it looks like Meebo suffers from the same "I wonder if I can...." syndrome too, but there is a major difference between their version of the syndome and mine, that being they succeed every time with what appears to be an effortless grace, a winning smile and there is no mess nor mayhem to be seen. It's quite obvious that they put in a solid foundation of planning, research and testing for every step they take so that any changes to the Meebo users experience are as smooth as possible, example being their launch of Meebo Me.

 I'm not a big fan of combining all my Instant Messenger logins into one, for sure I do it sometimes but more often than not I like them all in their rightful place, that being, I log into Yahoo! Messenger with my Yahoo! ID, ICQ with my ICQ number, Windows Live Messenger with my Microsoft Passport etc, with that in mind you can see how I don't really have a use for Meebo as a main IM client. In saying that though, Meebo is my first and only port of call if I need to quickly IM someone but I don't want to tempt fate due to borderline CPU useage at the time, or if I don't want the hassle and time delay incurred when faced with launching and logging in to a full blown IM client, or if I just plain old can't be bothered and it was the latter that sent me to Meebo just the other day and when I was there poking around waiting for my friend to IM me back I noticed the Meebo blog posting Meebo Me

Meebo Me allows your website visitors to chat with you directly from their browser window to yours... for me it was heaven in a super simple cut and paste, in fact if you've got a website then Meebo Me is a "must have" when it comes to providing ways and means for your visitors to get, and stay in touch with you, and Meebo Me offers a very simple way to go about it. All you need to do is follow the 3 step process at http://www.meebome.com/ to create your Widget, copy and paste the code to your website template, sign in to Meebo and you're away smiling from ear to ear with no looking back.

The widget creation and setup is so simple you could do it with one hand tied behind your back, or happily clutching your first morning coffee, and still end up with a great end result. I do have a slight issue with the fact that at this stage you can't alter the default widget colours to make it blend or co-ordinate with your website but it's a small issue and not one that I'm too bothered about, I am a little concerned with how the widget looks when view via my Mac though as it's barely visible, something that colour choices could possibly resolve, but again it's a small issue that is perhaps caused by my resolution and / or colour setup.

Widget size isn't an issue though, you can select from 3 dimensions, 160x250, 190x275 and 250x300. I had a slight hiccup with the sizes available in that I wanted to tuck my MeeboMe widget in our left hand side navigation panel but even 160x250 was too wide so a did a little plonking and it didn't take me long to work out that if I adjusted the dimensions of the code provided, I could make it fit, eg. the original code provided was width="160" height="250" but I manually edited it to width="142" height="350" and now it fits perfectly and displays just as it did when before I fiddled.

Now while the new dimensions were ideal for me, I also knew that my visitors would find the width quite restrictive, I also had concerns that the visitors would be trapped on a single page talking to me because while my conversation with them is stored in a single IM window that stays open in my browser, my visitors loose our conversation each time they change pages on my site as Meebo Me disconnects and then reconnects them...

How my visitors interact with me....	How I interact with my visitors
what I see when I'm logged into Meebo.com and using my widget...

Visitors can use the default widget...

or get the widget to launch in a new browser window... using the following link that appears at the base of the widget (shown in the screenshot to the left :) Window to small? Launch Live meebo bee Chat!

Meebo Me hasn't escaped all the issues associated with throwing a new product out into the general public, no one can, but it's how they have handled the problems that's put them into a league of their own. Meebo has acknowledged the issues as they have cropped up and they have kept everyone up-to-date every step of the way, something that end users greatly appreciate as it stops us wondering and subsequently twiddling with our settings and coding "just in case" it's us that's caused the issue.

Meebo also keeps their blog current with news and updates, and their forum is well maintained and loved, people are happy and more than willing to help each other out and there is a regular stream of suggestions and ideas that will help improve Meebo Me and push it to the top, where it without doubt has a place. The Meebo community is alive and well, and long may it be so :)

Main Meebo IM window when using my Meebo Bee widget...

Links...
Meebo Me Homepage: http://www.meebome.com/
Meebo Me Learn More: http://www.meebome.com/learnmore.html
Meebo Homepage: http://www.meebo.com/
Privacy Policy: http://blog.meebo.com/?page_id=38
Terms of Service: http://blog.meebo.com/?page_id=103
Blog: http://blog.meebo.com/
MeeboWiki: http://wiki.meebo.com/
Forum: http://forum.meebo.com/