I was tinkering with the widgets for the West Midlands NO! blog and spotted one called “Meebo”.  In the spirit of online adventure I visited meebo.com and I’m certainly glad I did!

Basically, it’s a kind of web messenger with a twist.  If you’ve ever used Trillian you’ll recognise the functionality.  You can log in to multiple IM clients at the same time – AIM, ICQ, MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo and Jabber.  You get a single contacts list and a common chat window regardless of which client you are using.

The killer feature, though, is the “Meebo Widget”.  In a nutshell, it’s a Flash instant messenger plugin for your website.  Users can visit your website and send messages to you using Meebo’s native IM protocol with messages delivered to you when you log in to the Meebo website.  Visitors to your website can send messages to you without registering and – this is the best bit – you can chat back to your visitors if you are online at the same time.

For a free service it can’t be faulted.  I’m a little concerned that there appears to be no way of them generating revenue from their users – it’s ad free – which means that unless they start generating some revenue they’ll most likely fold.  Hopefully they’ll make it ad-supported rather than subscription-based although Haloscan’s subscription-based service is the perfect price at $1 per month – worth accepting the payment for Haloscan and worth paying for subscribers.

Anyway, give it a test drive.  It’s on the outside sidebar under “Recent Posts”.