The Librarian in Black mentioned Meebo in a recent post on her blog. What is Meebo you ask? According to a Time magazine article Meebo is an "IM unifier. In plain English, it’s a one-stop shop for all your instant-messaging needs. Which is to say that Meebo puts all your IM clients — the individual programs that make instant-messaging services incompatible with one another — into one browser window. There’s no need to download all the different apps (MSN, AOL/ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber/Gtalk) to your computer to have any and all types of IM conversations."

According to LIB their latest "widget," MeeboMe, allows somebody to put a tiny snippet of code which in turn lets you put an IM box on your webpage that anyone can anonymously IM you. No extras are required to use it, no software, no downoads, no accounts. and it is all free way to offer IM service through your library's website. For librarians who can develop and access the code behind their web pages (lucky dogs...you) this could be a nice cheap alternative to providing IM reference at your hospital.

The LIB points to a Meebo post where they remark upon librarians' use of the MeeboMe: "We’ve also heard of librarians who are embedding meebo me on their library sites in order to let patrons ask reference questions…whoa!"

So like Alexia I too have decided to add MeeboMe to my blog. I would L-O-V-E to add this to my library's intranet page so that patrons who can't leave the floors could IM and I could provide some medical chat ref to those underserved users. But alas, I am one of those poor librarian souls whose hospital has chosen a content management system (specifically Microsoft CMS) which will not allow me to add or view the HTML to my little library web page. For somebody who is used to designing a library intranet site (for the same hospital system) using DreamWeaver and uploading to the webserver whenever I wanted, I feel a little neutered with my library intranet page that is little more than a glorified bulletin board.

It would be interesting to see how other libraries (any type, medical public, academic, special, you name it) are using MeeboMe and how they like it. Granted you can't do all of the fancy shmancy things like co-browse websites, but when I was doing chat ref for OhioLink the co-browsing part of the chat software never worked correctly. It always seemed lock up computers and if it launched at all. (It has been almost 2 years since I have done chat ref for OhioLink perhaps the co-browsing thing was solved.)