Meebo Community IM on Flickr from Meebo on Vimeo.
Imagine: Facebook-like chat for your entire ministry website.
Not just your main one, but also all of your additional sitelets and other online properties. Where your staff, congregation, and visitors can discuss, engage, ask questions, receive feedback, prayer support, you name it… all in real time with little to no barrier of adoption to start.
Now breathe in the fresh air knowing that it’s a real possibility. Enter Meebo, and their new push into Community IM:
Instant messaging service Meebo
announced a new product tonight called community Instant Messaging that will effectively provide “instant messaging in a box” to any site with a community. It will be a federated system, which means users can access friends on other meebo powered social networks, too.
The potential is almost limitless. As another reviewer put it:
When people gather, conversations are bound to happen. And while people may be gathering and chatting in Web-based IM interfaces like GTalk, Facebook Chat, and MySpace Chat, that user base is relatively insignificant compared to the untold millions of others who live and breathe in online communities outside those walled gardens.
Meebo, the leading “IM in the browser” play, realizes this. And with Community IM, they’re hoping to capitalize on it, by incorporating XMPP/Jabber IM into any Web-based community. If early numbers are any indication, they’re going to be wildly successful.
Wildly successful… almost definitely.
And the greatest thing…? It’ll be only time now until a completely open-source version of the same type of functionality and feature set is birthed. In fact, I’ve got some ground-eyes on some already that may be headed in that direction.
And you’ll be the first to know. Stay excited. It’s coming.
I have been using meebo for easily 6 months now, and while its a wonderful improvement over msn webmessenger, it unfortunately doesn't offer connections to twitter and/or facebook chat (yet). Somewhere somebody's going to have offer connections to every network or some of these networks will eventually shutdown due to something similar to Steve Rubel's attention crash.
To bring this back to the original topic when choosing a messaging platform for a community website, its important to consider your users, do you want to provide an extension of the network they already know or introduce them to something completely different? In most cases unless you are a multi-national organization the first option is probably the wisest.
daniel,
always appreciate your insight. comments rock.
i think i agree with you on the consideration of the audience and users… that should always come into play, if not be one of the primary considerations…
…
duh…!
w00t federated IM hope it doesn't go the way of identi.ca
indenti.ca still has some legs to stand on… perhaps.
I had been looking at several different things like this but between this, twitter, facebook, people seem reluctant to add anything else at the moment, it's like you can only learn so much and then your head explodes
I think if I can get most of our staff on twitter it would be big plus, thanks for the info though, will have to check this out
scott,
thanks for chiming in. one of our biggest jobs is filtering… which you obviously are aware of. being the "tech" guy in the crowd is a powerful responsibility… introduce new technologies with wisdom, intent, and discernment.
rock it dude.
Cool. A new gizmo to add to my site.
How do you keep discovering all of these cool services? I guess you are my direct line to being 'in the loop'.
google reader baby. accept no substitute
You should share your abundant list of places you subscribe to.
That is exciting news. Can't wait!
yes… we'll keep you posted…!