If you look at the left sidebar on my main page about 1/2 way down you’ll see that I’ve added a little “Meebo Me” chat widget.

When Meebo first came out, I wasn’t interested in moving all my IM services from Trillian or iChat into a web browser. That’s exactly what Meebo is, a web 2.0-happy web application for instant messenger services. But Meebo Me makes it more interesting. As you can see, you can embed this pretty little thing on any website allowing visitors to have a one-on-one conversation with you. There have been other chat interfaces for websites, but those are more like party lines where everyone can see what is being chatted. I like this better.

Originally, I only created the widget to add to our Salesforce.com home page as described in this Salesforcewatch.com entry. Many of our folks are already on IM and can ask me quick questions when they have trouble in Salesforce. But some are not and this saves the bother of going to email. Handy. When I installed it yesterday on our Salesforce page, it wasn’t working. So I also put it here to test whether the problem was with the code or Salesforce. Meebo must have been having trouble yesterday, because today it’s fine. I’ll leave it here anyway.

The only downside is that you can’t use it with Trillian (yet), so I have to make sure to keep the Meebo page open in a browser window when I want to be available. I’m opening and closing tabs all the time, so that’s annoying. Trillian (or iChat) can tell when I’m idle or away and will set my status accordingly without my having to think about it. Still, if you offer any kind of support to others, the opportunity to talk one-on-one regardless of whether the visitor already has an account on an IM service (and you know the other person’s username) is very nice.