Meebo's Release and WidgetsLive

On Friday, web-based IM company Meebo (Radar post) launched a new version of their site that pulled them out of Alpha. The release added a number of necessary features to their product. In addition to a cleaner design and improved performance they added the following:

Pop outs - This is really nice. Now you can move a chat or your buddy list into it's own mini-browser window. That's definitely been one of the things that I had really liked about MSN's WebMessenger. Now I can treat my meebo chats like a seperate application. I hope GChat gets this soon. [Brady: I learned from the comments that GChat has had this for a while]

Drag and drop buddy list management - Now that I am consistently using IM aggregators (I use Adium on the Mac) I find this type of feature essential.

Skinning - They are enabling users to switch back to classic meebo, but will also be introducing more skins in the future. Do I hear a developer ecosystem being created? Certainly they have enough fans to get one going without much trouble.

Localization - Meebo's users have been translating their service since the beginning. With this release they added Bangla, Creole, Esperanto, Iloko, Jawa, Latin, Malagasy, Marathi, Mongolian, Nias, Swiss German, Thai, Uzbek support.

They also worked on the performance around chatlogs and provided the ability to set your AIM profile (a top user request).

Meebo was presented as a success story today at WidgetsLive today. Their MeeboMe widget that they released a while ago doubled their account creation rate. A little background: to use Meebo's initial service you do not need a Meebo account, you need an account on a supported IM network like AIM, GTalk, MSN, Jabber, or Yahoo!. When they initially added Meebo accounts the main advantage was password storage not as much of a driver as the ability to chat-enable a webpage. As I learned today, Widgets are only going to continue growing in number, abilities and significance.