Meebo Introduces Firefox Entension

Funny thing about working for a software blog: We often find ourselves getting excited about various apps, but very rarely do they find a place in our day-to-day computing.

The process generally goes something like this::

1. We get pitched and/or hear some buzz about a new app.
2. We try it out.
3. We pan it, or fall in love and write all kind of wonderful things about it, somehow managing to work mentions of it into every subsequent post for the next two days.
4. We either move onto another app that does the same thing, only better, or realize that whatever it is that the app is really good at doing isn't actually something we needed to have done in the first place.

Occasionally, however, an app does become a regular part of the routine. For me, IM aggregator, Meebo, has been on of the elite few. In fact, I have it open right now, in Firefox, directly behind the Word doc that I'm currently typing on.

We met with the company's founder/CEO, Seth Sternberg, a week or so ago, and he was incredibly excited to talk about the company. It was a pretty unique vendor meeting--for one thing, Sternberg didn't bring a notebook, which meant no presentation, which, in turn, meant that he wasn't there to discuss a new product. I must have asked him five or six times whether he was totally sure that he didn't want to borrow a notebook for the meeting.

We largely spoke in industry abstractions, something I'm generally not a fan of in the context of a vendor meeting, but having been a Meebo user for a while now, I actually found myself engaged by the conversation about the future of the industry.






This week at the Web 2.0 convention in San Francisco, the company introduced an extension for Firefox, which, "greatly enhances the Firefox experience for meebo and Firefox fans."

The extension features buddy alerts, which the company claims is a first for an online IM client--I've just installed it, and am starting to realize how little I missed buddy updates, but I'm sure there are some Meebo users out there who have been waiting for this day.

There's also a buddy list sidebar--kind of cool, but again, not really necessary for those of us who are used to shoving their Meebo screen into a tab, undisturbed while we work on other things. The extension will automatically sign you on as well--okay this is kind of neat, but, yeah, not exactly earth shattering.

In all, there's nothing especially exciting about the extension, so far as I can tell. Looks like this latest update won't become a regular part of my schedule, after all.