EQO - An excellent IM app for blackberry Tuesday, September 09, 2008

A couple of weeks ago I was in New York on business and took the opportunity to catch up with a couple of good friends who are Brits working in the City. One has been there for 6 months on secondment and the other has been living there for 10 years, but both have gotten to know the City quite well.

I didn't bother taking a laptop on the trip, knowing that any data or software applications I needed could be accessed via the web and decided to simply take my Blackberry.

I'd also deliberately diverted my phone before leaving the UK to my Spinvox voicemail account, thereby avoiding the obscene international charges from T-Mobile but still benefiting from the speech-to-text message from anyone calling me.

As a result I found that I was able to easily operate using just the following apps
Having tried a few IM clients on the Blackberry, I've found that EQO is the best to date, for several reasons
I was using Gizmo5 previously, but it didn't connect to Gtalk directly which was the initial reason I switched. Whilst it can connect to Gtalk contacts, you have to manually add each of them to your contacts list by entering their gmail addresses. It too offers Voip and Texting.

When travelling it's considerably cheaper to use the text messaging facility offered within EQO since this costs 5p to send a text, bypassing international texting charges.

Whilst email and text are near substitutes, I find having IM on your phone whilst wandering around is brilliant, particularly because of the presence indicator letting you know if a person is available. In this case, I was able to get suggestions and quick answers to questions as I wandered around, simply because I knew that the people I was asking were online. More importantly, I was able to co-ordinate meet-up plans with my two friends whilst on-the-move and based on where I was when they freed up from work.

EQO is available for free on a large range of phones including Blackberry, Nokia, Samsung and LG.

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Meebo Rooms rock Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Many of the blogs I read were crammed with post about the release by meebo of Meebo Rooms. At first, I simply thought "whatever", another open chat room like Gabbly.

But after opening up Meebo, and finding myself with my own Room automatically alongside the site rejig, I thought I'd take a look.

Unlike traditional chatrooms however, they've enabled you to create a room, add it to you buddylist in meebo (to receive notifications even when you're not in the room), and embed that chat room on website, blogs and social network profile pages, just like you can with meebome. Moreover, you can even embed a room widget into a blogpost and it will show up in RSS readers (or at least it did in Google Reader), which means that you could run the comments section in a chat box and people can then subscribe to that blogpost room, which will make it far more interactive.

They've also incorporated the ability to watch online videos with others in real-time. So, insert a youtube or viddler video url into the room and you can watch it with others. On meebo rooms already they've got music artist themed rooms e.g. Lily Allen with her music videos, which you can join and participate in watching the content and chatting in real-time about. This would be amazing for live streaming content, as an online audience could easily form and chat at the virtual event.

Sadly, after only a few hours of being live, its already evident that Meebo may have released an uncontrollable "beast", since access to the rooms is open and unmoderated. Consequently some of the chat posts on "brand name" rooms are offensive in nature, together with the videos and photos that have been shared. Whilst such content can be reported to meebo and immediately disappear from your own view, the policing job is going to be substantial if people are not to be immediately deterred from visiting the rooms. Not sure how they will handle this.

Still, it's definitely worth a look and I may embed some of the rooms in future posts.

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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.

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Kool IM takes on Meebo Monday, February 12, 2007

Albeit still in Alpha, Kool IM is almost a replica of Meebo in that it provides an aggregation service across multiple IM networks.

They already have more IM networks than Meebo as you can see from the list below.


Whilst the application is reasonably intuitive, there's no help or FAQ sections to assist in steering round the application. That said, it's a very minimalist site.

The application can be run "embedded" within a browser tab or as a "popup" on the desktop similar in appearance to most desktop based IM applications.

As yet there doesn't appear to be a meebome equivalent, which is the reason why I'll be staying with meebo for now - it's amazingly useful to be able to converse with people visiting the blog. If that's not relevant for you but you are hooked into many IM services, this may suit you.

Kool IM definitely look like a group to watch as they seem to be an innovative crew.

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