Meebo and Facebook Chat

Soon after Facebook Chat showed up on my Facebook page, I emailed Seth Sternberg, one of the founders of Meebo, and asked if he'd be pulling Facebook Chat into Meebo. Seth replied: "Facebook has said publicly that they plan on opening Facebook chat up. To the extent we do so, we'd absolutely integrate it into meebo.com."

Good to hear. I love chat. I use both AIM and Yahoo. I hate having to pull up and keep track of multiple IM clients. So I've been a steady Meebo user for the past 18 months. Meebo can pull in IMs from AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, Google Talk and Jabber, and display them on a single Web page -- no download required. This has helped make Meebo quite popular, even if the company hasn't yet hit on a way to make a lot of money doing this.

Anyway, I also like Facebook, but having chat inside Facebook seems oddly inconvenient. I never think to pop it open and see who's logged in. But I don't want it to be any more prominent on the page because then it would be in the way. I'd much rather just add it to Meebo and use Facebook Chat in the same way I'd use AIM or Yahoo.

The next move is up to Facebook. We'll see if it follows through and opens its chat for entities like Meebo.

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