meebo Adds meebo Rooms
Last week we briefly mentioned that meebo, a free Web 2.0 (if you like) service that allows web-based (nothing to download) aggregation of all four major IM services (AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) and other Jabber-based services on a single window was set to release something new. Well, the release is here. meebo rooms are now here.
From the meebo blog:
meebo rooms is a neat new product that allows you to connect to other meebo users, friends, and visitors to websites. Think of them as chatrooms, on steroids!
Unlike traditional chatrooms however, we’ve built in a feature that enables you to create a room, add it to you buddylist (to receive notifications even when you’re not in the room), and here’s the kicker… embed the same room on your personal profiles and websites, just like meebo me!
What else have we got in store you ask? :) Media! We listened to you carefully, brought you all in for user studies, and called many more of you on the phone. We know that lots of you love watching YouTube, MetaCafe, and browsing through Flickr. We’ve incorporated the ability to watch your favorite URLs with your friends, all at once! Got a great link that you found on Digg? Paste it in your room and voila, it’s now shared.
For those of you old-schoolers who still love IE5.5, please continue to use http://classic.meebo.com, unfortunately the new rooms feature doesn't play well with older versions.
meebo is so simple to use and has a strong following in the library community. The ability to create and embed rooms should make the service even more valuable and popular. It's easy to think how a class could embed a meebo room on a class project page or a library might embed a "reference room" (for the lack of a better, more creative term) on their web site. They could also simply promote "a room" where librarians are hanging out and ready to help. The way meebo could be used in a library, classroom, or with a group of researchers working on the same topic are many. The other positive as we mentioned earlier is that meebo requires no downloads and works with all of the major services.
Finally, the blog post points to what meebo might have in store in terms of revenue model.
Just like any other meebo feature, we're testing the waters and experimenting with the best ways to integrate revenue generating properties into the service, in a non-intrusive way of course
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