More IM thoughts

I finally did get IMing to work. I found that the Meebo Me widget works just fine on my home computer, but not at work, unless you're using Firefox. I am still having just a wee bit of trouble wrapping my mind around the intersection of Meebo and other services. My middle-aged brain tends to think of Meebo as something that is essentially the equivalent of Google Talk or Yahoo Messenger, so I'm wondering why anyone would use anything other than Meebo or Trillian, since you're not limited to just one service. I am faintly, dimly aware that you can't necessarily IM someone using Meebo unless you already have an account on one of the services. But honestly, I am not even 100% sure that is true, since anyone can Meebo me through my widget.

Right?

I think I need to get our twenty-something page to explain this to me. This is definitely a generational thing. I know this from reading the blogs of some of my young whippersnapper colleagues, for whom IMing is yesterday's news.

I'm IMing (or not)

As you can see, I got the Meebo widget up on the ol' blog. I'm not sure it actually works, as my only buddies are offline at the moment, but we'll try again another time.

When I first heard about using IM at the reference desk, I thought it was a really dumb idea. But having an IM widget come up when a patron has an unsuccessful search in the catalog is quite possibly the most brilliant thing I've ever heard of. David Lee King is to be worshipped. So out-of-the-box.