RadiusIM - the social IM Sunday, May 13, 2007
For a while I'd like the concept behind Buddyping, which enabled people to publish their location easily and hence allow their friends & acquaintances to quickly see where people were. You could update your location via an LBS query (determined where you were from your mobile phone location), via SMS update or via a web page.
Unfortunately, it was a pain to have to remember to update it and because it didn't serve any other purpose, I quickly got out of the habit of logging into the service to update my location. Moreover, the service didn't appear to report how recent the location data was and hence it was often unreliable. The addition of free SMS messages to other buddyping friends was a nice add-on, but very few people I wanted to text were members.
Consequently, I was interested in RadiusIM which combines an IM aggregation service like (meembo and ebuddy) but with a location disclosure added in. Unfortunately this location data is only available if you are logged into RadiusIM and so ordinarily most of your "IM buddies" won't see it - nor will you see their location unless they use it too. Nonetheless, it is immediately a more useful service than Buddyping, provided it IM aggregation service is as good as others.
As I've mentioned before, I've stuck with meebo's service simply because of the meebome chat widget I've been able to embed in this blog. Whilst RadiusIM integrates with all the same IM services (yahoo, AOL, gtalk and MSN), it doesn't offer the same chat widget. These chat widgets aren't unique and I found another service recently called Mabber than also did the job and had coverage of the same IM services - unfortunately I found the site hopped between English and German language, with Jabber/Gtalk also reporting error messages.
So, I think for now I'll stick with Meebo and hope RadiusIM brings out a chat widget.
posted by John Wilson @ 3:32 PM Permanent Link
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1 Comments:
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At 1:42 PM,
said...
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You are welcome to test a new web IM : http://webuzz.im/ . WeBuzz's UI is like normal desktop Gtalk client. And it supports Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo and AIM, all in one.
Enjoy it.
