Daily Bitekletas

Today, meebo releases another milestone in online instant message. The service is called Meebo Rooms. Looks like a really nice move to bring back the glory of IRC (those were the days) by AJAXifying it. Over-all it really looks neat and useful. At the moment, only 80 people are allowed to per room but anyone can join in as a guest.

Meebo Rooms allows webmasters/bloggers or site owners to embed existing or user created room on third party sites. Neat features huh?! I’m a meebo fan myself and bound to explore this new service along the way.

At the office, we use Yahoo Messenger for communicating with co-workers at our remote office in the US. After successfully logging in to my Y! M, a notification window pop-up with an announcement regarding their “latest exciting feature” called Message History. This feature is related to their earlier announcement of their Web-based IM (flash) application.

So what does this mean for all YM users like me?

The good side - your chat history is available anywhere. After having been into “Laptop” Recovery mode all weekend - and lost all of my YM chat history because of my stupidity - it would have been very good if this Y! Messenger feature was lunched earlier on.

The bad side - your chat history is now owned by Yahoo. Privacy issues anyone?

Expectations, Expectations..

1. Yahoo! Messenger for desktop should fetch or store chat history on Yahoo! Server or Desktop depending on the user preference
2. History-off - allow a user to explicitly turn the Message History off on both party (e.g. I can turn off message archiving for a certain user so that the person I’m talking to cannot save the current conversation).

Other instant messaging platform that offers online message archiving/history (that I use are) are Gmail/Google Talk and Meebo.

Yahoo! recently launched their own web messenger site today. This is an answer to a growing demand for IM on the web many coming from users who are behind firewall or are not allowed to install additional software in their workstation.

Yahoo Web Messenger is built on Adobe Flash 9. At the moment, the features and functionalities supported by the Y! Web Messenger are subset of it’s desktop counterpart. Conference chat ( or group chat) is not supported. I’ve tried inviting myself using another account (my other) but Y! Web Messenger didn’t prompted me for incoming invitation.

Currently Features Includes:

• Adding Yahoo or Hotmail contacts
• Add avatars and emoticons
• Find Contacts
• Show online contacts only
• Fonts family, style and colors are supported
• Tabbed interface when talking to multiple contacts
• Chat History

I believe that the service is currently available only to users whose Prefered Content is Yahoo! United States. I had to change mine from Yahoo! Asia to Yahoo! United States because it was redirecting me to a non-existend page on Yahoo when accessing the http://webmessenger.yahoo.com

Other well known player in Web-Based (or Browser-based ) Instant Messaging service include eBuddy, Meebo & Wablet.