sean.blog

Meebo, my web based IM client of choice, has just added a new chat room feature. Meebo Rooms is the newest addition to the Meebo client, and from first glance appears to be very well designed and executed. Basically, you hop on over to Meebo, and you will see a new bar along the bottom of the screen. This bar controls your access to the new features of Meebo Rooms. You can see some featured channels, search/browse through the channels list, and also create your own room.

Creating a room is easy, you get a simple form that can be filled out. You get to select an icon for your room (or upload your own) and you even get to tag your room for easy categorization.

Once you have either joined a room or created your own you can invite people to join, chat, and share media and web pages. If you paste a link to a You Tube video into the chat, the movie will be available for everyone in the room to watch with the embedded media player. If you paste a link to a Flickr image it will display next to the link. If you paste a link, the media player will show you a Snap preview of the page (this seems to be on the fritz as I am writing this). It’s a nice little bit of interactivity for a chat room to have. Meebo has partnered up with some media companies to provide some new default channels with media features enabled.

I should note that everyone seems to get a personal chat room created for them by default. At least I had one created for me. I can go in and edit the chat rooms I have created, or even the auto generated personal room. You can subscribe to rooms on Meebo, and they are added to your buddy list. You will get notifications of activity in your rooms even if you are not currently connected to them. One of the coolest features is that I can take any chat room and embed it in a web page outside of Meebo. Below is the Nintendo Wii room that someone created.

I am pretty impressed with this new feature. I think it will be a nice compliment to other web services, and provides a great way for people with various fan sites and groups to add a chat related feature. I am already seeing some music related chat groups go up on Meebo that I want to check out. If I had one suggestion to make it would be to provide a way to hide join/leave messages, since in the big rooms it fills up the chat screen pretty quick.

I created a few quick rooms of my own, I might try to create some rooms to go a long with my Ma.gnolia groups. You can visit my Social Bookmarking Room or my Board Game Room.  you don’t have to sign up for Meebo to join the chat room.

There is sure to be lots of Meebo Rooms talk on Techmeme today if you want to follow peoples thoughts on the matter. See you in Meebo Rooms!