meebo me widget! – Linking IM and web

Now, I love Meebo. It’s a real life-saver when working behind corporate firewalls that block IM traffic (and where the HTTP filters haven’t yet got round to block the meebo.com domain!). In addition it saved my bacon when my favourite IM client, Proteus, went and died on the Intel MacBookPro…

So – that’s good enough then. Except they’ve gone and done something very clever: embedding a chat window as a widget in your blog or other web site.

Details of the widget are here

I’ve written about some of the implications for retailers in this article on InternetRetailer.info
but one of the interesting points I didn’t cover is the way that you can be alerted to visitors (who are in your buddy list) passing by your website. Neat.

Of course this won’t please those who are paranoid about their movements being tracked, or who are sneaking a peak at a friend’s website, but then again I doubt that these people would have Meebo accounts anyway.

For my part I see it as a further step in the ‘conversational web’, where a website or blog is used as a hub or contact centre for an asynchronous conversation – by links, comments, email and now IM.

Someone remind me what a telephone is for?