Lightweight & Useful Software

Adron Hall referred me to a chat client called Meebo. I was hesitant to believe in his claims about it's robustness, since I've tried Yahoo, Trillian, MSN, Go!, and atleast one other chat client; and I have had minor complaints about all of them.

First, Yahoo Messenger is nice looking, and it does allow file transfers, and webcam views, but.....I can only be logged on as one person. Most people would have no problem with that constraint, but I am many people doing many things, and I like to be able to have access to all my profiles simultaneously. One other problem, is that I like leaving as much RAM available as possible, and Yahoo's client has a large footprint.

After using Yahoo Messenger for years, I was referred to Trillian by Tom Puleo. Trillian is nifty in that it doesn't use quite as many system resources as Yahoo does, AND it allows me to sign in as multiple people simultaneously. It claims that I can use it to contact people via MSN, and ICQ as well. However, I can only use one chat service at a time. In other words, I can be multiple Yahoo people, but not multiple Yahoo people AND multiple MSN people. Further, the file transfer acts as if it's sending a file to someone, but it never works. It also doesn't allow me to accept files. I chose the free Trillian version, and it does not expose the webcam functionality; one must pay for that. I love that I can access multiple Yahoo profiles, but I want more. One last complaint about Trillian----it's not pretty.

I must make one important advantage of Trillian clear, before I continue: if you have multiple Yahoo profiles, and like to monitor multiple Yahoo email accounts from these profiles, Trillian will do this for you, so that you don't have to keep signing out, and signing back on. Trillian will monitor each of your email accounts (Yahoo) and pop up a message that you can click on, stating you have new mail, and from whom. I am consciously giving up this great feature, to gain RAM availability for all my other computer ventures.

Now-------------along comes Meebo. You do NOT need to download anything---it is available inside your browser. The constraints here are that you need to leave the Meebo page open, once you have logged in. If you wish to know when someone sends you a message, you have to either turn your sound on to hear the beep, or keep that Meebo window visible. Four very positive things about this app, that keeps me tethered to it:

1. You truly can be logged on as multiple people, via more than one chat service
   
2. Since you download nothing, your machine's resources are pretty much left available for heavy-duty computing.
3. If you wish to access a past conversation from a computer other than the one where that chat took place, you can do so. Meebo stores chat logs for you on their server. This may terrify some people, but I don't have anything to hide, so I'm not worried. And if those people don't like their conversations being logged, they really shouldn't use any chat service.
4. Chat widgets: these tiny web page objects can be embedded in your personal web page/blog. If you wish to chat with visitors to your website, this is the way to go.

I am not abandoning Yahoo of course: I ran across 2 Yahoo products that are free and look quite promising. I will test them, and re-post with my thoughts. They are Yahoo Notes, and Yahoo Intellisync...............Later!