San Francisco— Meebo, the foremost Web-based instant messaging aggregating service, has attained its current level of popularity by providing Web access to popular IM interfaces like AOL, MSN, and GTalk. And quite recently, Meebo extended its functionality to embrace this growing market — now expanded its support to Facebook and MySpace IM chat.
Meebo confirmed that it has been quite a while since it added support for a new IM network. “Aside from our first Community IM network Flixster a month or two ago, the last networks we added were Jabber and Google Talk on September 19, 2005,” the company said.
Similarly the IM services already accessible from Meebo, Facebook and MySpace IM accounts are now accessible from within Meebo, allowing users to concurrently chat with friends from both networks, while also having access to other IM contacts.
The MySpace team has assisted Meebo to complete its integration. The Facebook integration depends on Facebook Chat for Pidgin, an open source IM project.
For those eager to have all of their instant messaging services open under one window but do not prefer having multiple windows open and do not want to download yet another application, Meebo is the perfect web-based instant messaging service.
With Community IM, a Meebo project that will launch Web-based IM features to a number of community oriented sites over the coming months, allowing users of those sites to engage in IM conversations when visiting their favorite Web sites.
Facebook users, who are already acquainted with Community IM concept of logging into a Web site and chatting with friends, will now have access to their Facebook friends through Meebo when visiting any number of sites on the Web.
Meebo also allows you to sign into your favorite instant messaging services such as AIM, GTalk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, and Yahoo without ever downloading or installing a single application.
With the inclusion of these massive user bases, Meebo becomes — perhaps — the foremost service for managing all of your IM conversations in one place.
Also last month, Meebo released a mobile version of its service for Google’s Android OS, available via the Android Market.
So, without much melody — and basically in the same way Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and the Open Stack are extending the reach of the social graph — it appears that Meebo just moved the Web-based IM conversations of millions of users and their contacts beyond the walled gardens of social networks to the Web at large. And that is pretty exciting.
To check the new Meebo Facebook and MySpace access, log into your Meebo account and add the new accounts to your profile. Or visit Meebo and log into your Facebook and MySpace accounts from there.