Jim sent me this recently… looks like a new messenger client that aggregates all our accounts.
Except this new messenger client isn’t really that new. Infact… I’d say everything is pretty boring. Well, ok there is something that’s cool—you can pull your facebook contacts into your chat. That’s actually really cool.
But wait, do I really want another tab open with my chats? You’re telling me I have to have this thing open all the time if I’m a mac user? I already have a chat application open—Adium. That seems to work better.
So what can we learn from this basic desktop chat client? Well, Facebook chat would be a really-really nice feature if I could access it anywhere.
Really.
We all can benefit if we could use suck in our Facebook contacts into our chat applications.
So what does that mean for the middle men like meebo, imo.im, and so on? Well, their days may be over, unless they think beyond “chatting”… and look at other interactive ways for people to communicate with each other and the web.
So what is imo.im to me? It’s a nice mention on tech crunch… It, however, isn’t solving a problem for me. I like the facebook integration in the product, but that’s about it. It’s not sticky enough for me to keep. And the desktop interface is pretty oldschool—I really don’t need another window, inside a window, inside another window… just to chat. If you really want to do that, you could try building a toolbar add-on for firefox. I might use something like that. I haven’t found an add-on that does that well.
You listening Facebook? I want the ability to communicate with my friends anywhere. Empower us, the users, to make more connections… and in return, I will use your product even more. In fact, I probably will NEED you to be my true identity manager at that point.
Here’s the techcrunch mention. Here’s imo.im… try it yourself.