Meebo may be the application you've been dying to have on Linux. It's an IM client which handles multiple prootocols -- Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk, ICQ, AIM, and Jabber. While that's fewer than Pidgin, it's still a lot. The tasty addition is the support of voice and video chat, which Pidgin lacks. Meebo also has group chat functions, multi-player games, and streaming music videos. Oh, yeah, it's also cross platform. How does it do this? It's a web app, of course.
The voice and video functions require Flash support in your browser, but so much of the web is already Flash that you probably wouldn't notice, right?
The full list of "extras" is:
- Voice / Video chat
- File transfer
- Group voice chat
- Group video chat
- Multicast -- create your own live show
- Transliteration into Hindi, Russian, and Arabic
- SMS
- Shopping
- Multi-player and single-player games like checkers, chess, sudoku, and pirate wars
- Recent political and entertainment photo feeds
- Sony music videos
Web applications show great promise for the future of Linux.
ReplyDeleteThe one feature which Meebo was missing the last time I looked at it, that most of us feel is a "must have" for a modern IM client, is the ability to connect to all of the chat networks at the same time. Meebo required multiple windows for each network, rather than letting you do them all in one location. Has this changed?
Meebo has a contact window which looks almost exactly like Pigin's, with all the contacts in one place, so I think that's what you want.
ReplyDeleteThe good thing about Meebo (and Google Apps and all web apps) is that it is being updated constantly. They add new features every month. The applications list just keeps getting bigger. Most of them are useless, but voice / video was added just recently, and you can't call that minor.
I have great hopes for web apps. They can't solve all issues (I'm never going to do image editing online ...), but there are many places where it doesn't matter in the least, especially places that already require Internet (or LAN) access like chat, collaboration and e-mail.