September 2, 2011
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meebo
Meebo just had some pretty crazy radical changes to its service… and I find myself actually liking them. It’s a pretty good change. I’m a bit annoyed that I can’t find some features of the old service like games and chat logs, but checking in and sharing websites you visit is a powerful tool, basically its what google+ and facebook allow you to do only for those sites it takes many more clicks.
I’m not sure about this VIP and Quests stuff. Not sure about that at all.
That said… this has the potential to beat Google+ an Facebook at their own game. They just need to make a few fixes to their interface, add a feature here or there, somehow get millions of people to know about their service and sign up, and they’re set. None of that crap requirement to be known as your real name and automatic integration with not one but ALL your chat clients, and integration with your Xanga as well and your web browser. That’s pretty sweet. Maybe integrating with Meebo will turn out to be the best move Xanga ever made. I just hope Meebo keeps a focus on making things open and easy for people to integrate and use. That’s the key to the future. Closed services are never going to survive.
Other interesting services in the social networking scene I’ve got my eye on are things like SubJot and the recently improved GetGlue program. Both are fascinating and offer things the big giants lack. They are more specialized though. In fact put these services together, add some encryption and anonymity features, and blog integration and you’d kinda have what I want in a social network. I also find the prolifera of new Alternate Reality Games and Story based internet gaming that integrate narrative online elements, fandom, and real world interactions to have enormous potential.
Too bad Google has such a massive reach that they can quickly drown out other competition. It’s not that Google+ is bad (excluding their dumb real name policy), it’s actually quite good. But I don’t think it is nearly so good that it deserves its exponential growth. Much of that is based on the strength of the Google brand more than anything about the service itself. Though I do admit putting Circles front and center was a smart idea. I’ve been saying the way twitter and facebook handled lists/groups was idiotic for a long time now. I’m glad SOMEONE is trying to do it right. I don’t think circles are perfect though and not nearly as intuitive as it could be, but it’s a big step in the right direction.
But still. As much as I find it fascinating to see what services win this social networking game everybody is competing on, my personal belief is we need a new game. I don’t think social networking is the future, it’s at best a bridge to something better, and pretty annoying rickety unstable crumbling bridge at that.
Some features I’d like to see in Meebo. Downloading chat logs. Off The Record communication integration. Easy TOR integration. Some better spam controls. Lists/Topics/Circles. Make your privacy policy more clear (Does signing up require you to expose your web browsing history to meebo? If so that’s dumb and should stop. If not they need to make that clear to users.). Make it possible to post short messages that aren’t check-ins and aren’t status changes. Change the UI to make entering such messages as easy as Twitter. Make the following list more front and center. Make it easy to search for users who are in your chat clients to see if they are on the new meebo. Make a really open API so lots of developers can make improvements to the service.
And if I can’t figure out how to access my chat logs now that they’ve made me switch over then I may well take back all the nice things I said about this service and quit.
Anyway that’s just a random web tech thoughts update.
Comments (5)
Oh, you just meant switching to the new version of Meebo. Please ignore that part of my comment.
@JoJoTheModern@twitter - The funny thing is the design of Google+ feels more like Tumblr than twitter or facebook but yeah you’re right they are ultimately trying to replace Facebook and be the goto place for networking and they seems to have the same internal ideology that Facebook has. I dont’ know where Facebook got their weird twisted ideas about privacy and anonymity and hearing Google echo them was just downright creepy.
Sharing is the key component of these sites from our perspective but of course from company perspectives that’s just sort of a necessary prerequisite. Gathering information, signals, and most importantly the kind of information that lets them link users with various content producers, service providers, and advertisers that they might pay for is what is key to them.
Not to worry, our plans to take over the world will still be safe from the CIA thanks to our continued use of Pidgen+OTR. ^_^ I’m just using meebo to see what it’s like and for link sharing. Maybe one day I’d switch if they switch over to OTR, but until then I plan on continuing to use it as needed only.
I’m just here in hope of learning how to kill the useless(to me) virus. With an occasionally spotty net connection, it disgusts me to see a page load in milliseconds, then stall forever while the Task-Bar shows {waiting for rd.meebo, con (intentional error)
You and I differ mightily on the value of all these brain-storm add-ons, which are an insult to the founding purpose of the net: real content.
So how does one such as myself tell the browser to IGNORE the offending calls in the HTML, etc source code?
I’m not alone, I suspect. I spent 20 years as a child milking real cows, carrying real milk, for real people, and already our people hated the derivative parasitic elements even in 50s agrarian society. We made phone calls for weddings, births and funerals, and when a cow was in heat. And nowadays 2 out of three plastic pedestrians can’t seem to take a step without someone banal to ‘chat’ with. Probably chatting about chatting.
Any help is welcome, and my opt-out won’t kill the beast, no worry./js, tel aviv
@jsolberg - Heh. Are you referring to the meebo minibar? I’ve already disabled mine. I wrote this post ages ago and nearly everything i said in it is wrong.
Anyway in chrome it can be disabled via Wrench Symbol->Options->Extensions. In Firefox I think it’s Firefox Button->Add Ons->Extensions. In both cases you can find it in the list and disable or remove it.
To remove the Xanga specific Meebo bar Go to your user name at the top of the screen and click settings. Then click chat and uncheck the boxes for “Show chat bar on public pages (your site)”, “Show chat bar on private pages (your account)” and “Automatically sign me in to chat”.
If you want to totally block meebo from ever doing anything again on any site, you can download an extension like firefox’s noscript and set meebo to blocked.
Hope this helps.
@nephyo - Sure does help, if mainly to know some alternates. I killed mine through the Hosts file re-direct, and published that and two Ad-Blok methods for Firefox, on my site.
Thanks, friend for tolerating my irate rant. It’s how I truly feel, but I’m aware of being somewhat a voice crying out in desert.
Your replying, and/or re-assessing of the pox’s utility, if that’s a fair guess, made my day.
Later: Xanga tell the free-users like me to go get Premium if I want to kill the bar on Private page. Just thought I’d mention that; I’d never been to the settings screen before. It also contains opt-in/outs for features Xanga no longer even has. Tough running a web-site I guess.