For those of us who want the convenience of instant messaging from any computer equipped with a Web browser, there’s Meebo. Meebo is a Web app, there to comfort us with our friend’s instant pestering during long hours spent doing tedious busywork on public computers. In days of yore, it came to be quite popular among tech-savvy college kids.
Nowadays, with the rise of smartphones, Meebo’s pitch isn’t quite as attractive. Smartphones are easier to access than a public computer running some flavor of Firefox or Internet Explorer 6. While Meebo’s service works on the iPhone’s browser, it’s not as good as a native iPhone app. So what did the folks at Meebo do? Well, they went ahead and made a Meebo iPhone app.
First shown off in March ’09 and released in a timely fashion last Monday, Meebo for the iPhone does what you’d expect of a multi-client IM app, and it does it for free. Chief among its features are the ability to search through your past chats on the iPhone app and on Meebo.com, so no matter where you go or what you go up to last night, you can always check to see what unfortunate things were said.
Besides that, the Meebo app supports push notifications, unlike some other popular IM apps (cough, Skype), and you can seamlessly switch between chat sessions on the iPhone app and Meebo.com on your computer, for those moments when you’d really like a full-blown keyboard. You can also set status messages for individual accounts to help separate your business life from your personal life, and manage IM friends as you would in any other IM app.
Meebo supports AIM, Yahoo, Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, Facebook, MySpace and 100 other networks. It requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later.