web messengers

Now I should have waited posting the last post yesterday as today I discovered one cool feature in GMail. You can see Your other GMail contacts and chat with them using cool AJAX interface. It's all in Your browser tab (or window if You're still an IE guy) and it makes a soft ping if somebody sends You a message. Nice and smooth.


Now talking about web based messengers, I guess the oldest one is e-Messenger.net. At least what comes to my mind. [MSN, AIM, YIM]

For MSN there is MSN Web Messenger.

For AIM there is AIM Express.

For YIM there is Yahoo Web Messenger. Perhaps interesting to mention here is that Yahoo has gone the Java way. Figures - as they are a Java house with long traditions.. Anyone who has played their online snooker or chess sometimes in the last 5 or so years knows what I'm babbling about.

For ICQ there is ICQ2go.

In addition to the big players couple of smaller service providers manage to deliver a rather usable solution.

ILoveIM - using popup windows [MSN, AIM, YIM]

Meebo - most innovative, using AJAX. On the other hand, it's not working as well as it should be, yet. It's slow and it has annoyingly a lot of bugs, so I would call it unusable - yet. For example, I couldn't see who's in a multiuser conversation as they were displayed only as "MSN chat".


I would still use the e-Messenger.net, but Meebo shows a lot of potential with their little startup crew. Those web messengers look ok, but I don't see people using them widely too soon. And as the contact list is on the messenger service server anyhow, then there is no synchronization problem with different computers.
Still, I'd like to point out one weak spot in this link - using IM clients on different computers leaves Your chat logs scattered around. I think that there lies the real potiential of the kinds of Meebo. But then - why would You trust some unfamiliar company with Your intimate chat logs on their servers? So it's a double edged sword - the Big Brother is watching.

Until then, web messengers really come in handy when You don't have administrative rights to the computer You use (like in the case of BofH or Your employees lame policy).

PS I really hate this Blogger "feature" that it shows the date I created the draft, not when I posted it.