Data Circle

Found this via Photo Matt.

Meebo is a way of accessing your instant messing accounts (AIM, Yahoo, MSN and ICQ) through an AJAX-powered web interface. It’s still in an alpha stage, but so far it looks promising – I logged in with my Yahoo account (which I never use anyway) and the interface was very good considering that it’s all done within a web browser. However, I see three major problems arising with this service.

Firstly, there is no privacy policy. That’s right, these people (who I have certainly never heard of before) want you to type in your username and passwords for a third party service into their web site without any formal policy about what they do with the information. That sounds awfully like the scam Paypal/eBay emails that make their way into my inbox every day. Admittedly there is a post on their forums explaining that they don’t record login information or conversations and I doubt they’d have gone to the trouble of setting up the site just to watch people say “lol” to each other all day (which, let’s face it, is what 90% of IM conversations consist of), but I’m still wary of entering my details, and I don’t think I’m ever likely to use the service with my MSN account. I’m not saying that the people behind the site are running some of scam, but you have to admit that it does look at least a bit dodgy.

Secondly, there’s no Jabber support, which means you can’t use your normal Jabber account or a Google Talk one. Given that Jabber is the only open and properly documented IM protocol that sees any amount of use, you’d think they’d have added support for it.

Finally, I can see this service getting very popular in a short space of time as people start linking to it. That might sound like a good thing until you realise that one of the following consequences will almost certainly occur. The first possibility is that the site gets too popular for its own good and collapses under the weight of users. The second (and in my opinion more likely) possibility is that suddenly a paid subscription becomes available and free accounts can only talk for ten minutes at a time, or some other restriction. The knock on effect of the latter consequence could also be for the companies that run these IM services to suddenly turn their attention to Meebo and say “stop profiting from our services”.

Overall, I think it’s a nice idea in theory and will probably be doing the rounds on popular blogs for the next few days, but sooner or later it will hit legal, financial or technical problems and slowly fade back into oblivion.