Fun with Meebo!

I already used Meebo as a means to login to my MSN account when I'm away from home, but I didn't know about being able to implant such a cool little widget! I was totally pleased about that! Actually, MSN isn't really my first choice anyways. I fell into my current IM configuration out of necessity. I haven't really been much for chatting since the old days of AOL through a 2400 baud modem. By the time I felt the need to re-initiate myself, the people I wanted to talk to were spread all over the spectrum of IM services. Right now, my sister uses Yahoo!, one of my brothers uses AIM, the other's on Gtalk, my ex-girlfriends are all on MSN (curious…), my old friends from college use Silc, one website I frequent requires IRC, we're on a jabber network at work…So I don't think I really talk to that many different people, but they're ALL with different services! That's why at home I just run Pidgin (Formerly Gaim). I can make accounts here and there to talk to each of my different friends, and then tie it all back together at home. Meebo is nice, because it can do the same thing, only it follows you wherever you go!

In a library context, I can see some potential for IM as a reference tool. Really, the only way to know how well it would work and to root out potential problems is to try it out and see what works. I would like to add a caveat, however. I don't think that using a Meebo widget or any other proprietary third party free service would be the ideal choice for anything beyond a trial run. It's one thing if we're paying somebody for support and guaranteed uptime, but many of these services are on an as-is basis. If something breaks, we would not have control over how long it's broken for. Therefore, my first impulse would be along the lines of an open protocol such as jabber running on a server that we own. In fact, we already have this in place, it's just being used for staff only right now. If we were to try and use it for public reference, we'd want to keep it isolated from the staff network in some way. We don't need our metaphorical gravy escaping from our proverbial mashed potatoes and drowning our hypothetical peas. That's my opinion!