Meebo Links Facebook And MySpace With Chat
By linking up with two of the world's largest social networks, Meebo is expanding its reach considerably. The social networking and instant messenger aggregator service hopes that by bringing the already existing user bases of Facebook and MySpace to bear on their service that the visibility of the company will get a considerable uptick.
MySpace and Facebook shouldn't protest the move if they want their chat platforms to gain any traction. Both MySpaceIM and Facebook Chat have been live for some time now and neither one has taken off as a viable chat service. The problem, most likely, revolves around the fact that in order to chat a user must be logged into either social network to communicate with their friends.
But by joining forces with Meebo, both of the social network's chat services can be left on all day, every day. AOL's Instant Messenger has been a staple of online messaging for years now, mostly because it's an application that can run in the background of a computer all day while other applications are being run. Google's Gchat has quickly reached the same level of usage for the same reasons. And, of course, ICQ has been around for longer than either of those services.
All three gained popularity and notoriety for their ease of use and low level of maintenance and awareness users needed to monitor the applications.
Facebook Chat and MySpaceIM, however, are more time consuming and require more of an active role in monitoring. Not necessarily bad traits for social networks looking to increase user interaction, but for workplace communication and casual chatting with friends after hours, neither system was designed to be particularly sticky.
That's the advantage that Meebo brings to those chat applications. Users with a Meebo account can log into their account, add their Facebook and MySpace accounts, and begin chatting with all of their contacts across both social networks.
Now, a buddy list that has 15 work contacts expands to a list that is only limited by the number of friends a user has on those two massive social networks.