Meebo is determined to set themselves apart from other messenger alternatives. Google has been working on a better online messenger, and Yahoo! has been working on integrating chat with their email, but Meebo has been working on something the others don’t have…chat rooms!
These aren’t just your typical chat room either. After you create a room, or find a room that you really like, it can be added to your buddy list so that you’ll be notified when someone chimes in. What a great idea, now you don’t have to sit around with the chat room open waiting for someone to respond! Of course if it is a highly active room it could probably get annoying.
Most rooms will probably have a media player located near the center (pictured above). Anytime someone posts a link to a video on YouTube or MetaCafe it will play in that portion of the window, or an image will appear if it is a link to a Flickr photo. With the help of Snap previews, a screenshot will be shown for all other links.
They also made it possible to embed a chat room in your own site (like MeeboMe), and allow you to choose from a variety of options. You can pick whether you want a sidebar version of the chat room, one without a media player, one with a media player, or you can customize the size of the room to fit your exact dimensions.
There are a couple of downfalls that I have noticed though. The first is that there is no way to “silence” notifications for when people join or leave a room, which quickly becomes bothersome when you’re trying to watch what people are saying. Not only that, but the rooms are currently limited to just 80 members. In a talk TechCrunch had with the CEO they said that they hope to extend that number, but that could compromise the stability of the rooms. In the meantime they will just clone a room each time the limitation has been reached.
Meebo is absolutely on fire (in a good way)! According to Read/Write Web they have 2 million registered users, and get 1 million sessions each day who send about 100 million messages. Their growth is tremendous which can be seen in this Alexa graph, and the fact that they have 2 million registered users when they don’t even require registration is pretty mind boggling. It just goes to show that the people using their service keep coming back!
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Well its about stinkin time someone remembered the way chat rooms used to be. Ten years ago, even 5 or 6, chat rooms were everywhere on the net, today, good luck finding any outside of IRC that aren’t total crap. Everythings all social network Myspace/Facebook crap today and people have totally forgotten about chat rooms. Myspace has some, but their crap, full of horny rude little teens, hope these don’t turn out the same way. Maybe its just me, but I used to love just coming home after a long day and just going into a good chat room, just for some relaxing conversation with some other people.
I used to be a chat room fan as well about 7 or 8 years ago. You could have a lot of great conversations, but somehow they started fading away.
If I remember correctly I think I always used Yahoo! chat rooms. I’m not sure if they are still around but I know a lot of people were always on them.
Well thats, different. Played with em a little, not exactly what I had in mind when I say I miss chat rooms. These Meebo ones are, all set up by websites and companys and bands n stuff, was expecting like, u know, chat rooms, standard categorys of rooms like news, movies, health, etc. These are ok, but, seem more like, a new videos links sharing thingy then a chat room. Very Web 2.0/Social Networking influenced.
Chatrooms were great… Until the huge wave of spammers. “18/f/ca, Click here for pics.”
Did you know Yahoo! has launched a web messenger?
http://webmessenger.yahoo.com/
It’s got a chat archive (the most glaring omission of Y! mail beta’s chat).
I agree, it isn’t exactly a chat room that you would expect, but anyone can create a room for any topic. Now they just need to figure out a better way to organize them so that users can find what interests them.