Online IMs: Your Choice?

The first name that comes into one's mind when we talk of online instant messengers is surely Meebo. With Meebo you don't need to install any software. This approach is very handy when you use several PCs – at home, at work and on a business trip, for example. Besides, sometimes IM clients are not allowed on your corporate PC – while the online IM can still be accessed.

Meebo is really a very successful and popular product. Mashable! reports 1.2 million logins and 75 millions of messages sent daily. In December Sequoia invested $3.5 million in the startup while on Wednesday a new investor joined: TechCrunch wrote about new $9 million coming from Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Sure, Meebo is not a unique service. The best known competitors for Meebo are eBuddy, KoolIM and Mabber. Same as Meebo all these services aggregate your accounts with several messengers (but eBuddy only works with AIM, MSN и Yahoo! Messenger while its competitors support other popular messengers – Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber). The most powerful online IM solution in terms of the number of clients you can access is KoolIM – here you can log in to IRC, RSS News, Sametime and Stock Channel. Besides, you can also set KoolIM to ckeck your email accounts.

The most important competitive edge for Meebo is its Meebo me widget: it can be customized and embedded to your own website for your visitors to be able to contact you instantly. It is important that you will receive messages from your visitors via the same interface you use to chat with your friends.

eBuddy users are also able to use a similar widget. But there is a major difference here: eBuddy widget is not intended for a website owner to chat with visitors – here the owner will simply be able to access his eBuddy account from his website or blog.

All the solutions mentioned above do not require you to register: you can simply login using your screen names to the messengers you need. If you register, you will be able to access all your accounts in future without entering the user names and passwords again. This approach enables you to try various solutions without increasing their user base – and only register when you make your choice. But still there is an application that requires registration to use your accounts – Mabber. I doubt it makes the service easier to use, to tell you the truth. Besides, I had to wait for a confirmation letter (containing a special token necessary to use Mabber) longer than half an hour.

Meebo, KoolIM and eBuddy are very stable. Messages are received and sent as fast and stable as with your usual desktop IM clients. I have never lost any messages when working with these applications. But I actually had some troubles with Mabber trying to use my ICQ account: though the messenger told it was ready I did not receive messages from other users and could not send any messages myself.

Both Mabber and eBuddy have their mobile versions. At that the mobile version of eBuddy works with xHTML or WAP 2.0-enabled phones. WAP support makes it possible to use eBuddy even with older phones.

Sure, the existing desktop IM applications have more features and settings right now. But still development of online applications is progressing and soon they will definitely win away a certain share of the market. Especially taking into account the fact that even now for certain users such web applications is the only possible way to use their IM accounts.