Meebo me!

Burning the midnight oil last night, I installed the ‘Meebome‘ chat widget in this blog. I almost fell off the couch when I had a SPOETNIK blogger starting a chat 30 seconds later. This was about one o’ clock in the morning! I’m not the only SPOETNIKER burning the midnight oil!

At a more reasonable hour this afternoon I contacted SPOETNIK via Gmail Chat, which is built in with my Gmail account, to practice chatting with that and also to invite SPOETNIK to use my new Meebome chat widget on my blog. This was a good test because I found out a few things about Gmail Chat and about Meebo.

Gmail Chat was really easy, just one click on the contact name ‘UBAspoetnik’ which had been added when I received the confirmation e-mail from SPOETNIK, and I had a reply from one of the SPOETNIK crew. Everything worked just fine! My contact agreed to help me test the Meebome widget so I switched to my blog to wait with baited breath for my contact to start chatting.

Nothing happened. I’d deactivated the Meebome window when I’d signed off last night. Oh oh oh, how do I get it restarted? I tried clicking on the activate /deactivate button at the top of the chat window – nope, that didn’t work. Then I went to the Meebo help page that I’d put in my bookmarks – didn’t see a quick answer there. I tried clicking in the chat window – nope, oh help! Finally I thought about signing in on the Meebo home page. Had another panic moment when I couldn’t think of my Meebo ID. Recovered, signed in, rushed back to my blog page and clicked in the window which was now active. I waited, expecting to see text being typed by UBAspoetnik.

Nothing happened. Went back quickly to the Meebo page where I saw that UBAspoetnik was typing questions wondering where I was! Phew, it was a relief to see that it worked after all and that UBAspoetnik had had enough patience to wait. I put my confusion behind me and the chat session went well after that.

After the session was ended by UBAspoetnik I saw in the chat panel that I had another chat guest. The wierd thing was that the guest didn’t type anything at all. Finally I figured out (trial and error again) that the mystery guest was myself! I’d started a chat session when I’d clicked in the active Meebome window trying to contact UBAspoetnik. Now all I had to figure out was how to sign off. There was no ‘Sign out’ button in the widget and clicking on the activate /deactivate button didn’t work either. It took me a a little while to make the ‘thought leap’ back to the Meebo page to search for a ‘Sign off’ button there. I didn’t see it right away because it’s right down the bottom of the page (bottom right) and for me ‘below the fold’ as they say for newspapers.

Lessons learned:

• Sign in on the Meebo page with your Meebo ID or another IM (instant messaging) account that you’ve registered by Meebo in order to activate chat in the Meebome widget.

• The guest uses the widget window on your blog, you use the Meebo chat panel.

Comment & chat

This evening I took a little time browsing in the list of blogs on SPOETNIK – there are so many! I ended up picking a few at random and leaving some comments on the posts that I liked. The mix of personal and professional content made it really interesting reading.

I’ve started on SPOETNIK’s exercise for week 4 which is all about chat. We use Chatfone at the UB EUR for chat with our library users – or we did until recently. We’ve not been able to use Chatfone for a few days now so this is a good time to experiment with alternatives. I’ve been reading the information on Meebome. It looks pretty good. I’ll fit it into my blog to play with it. This should be pretty easy to do in WordPress as Meebo is one of the widgets available in the set of standard widgets for blinging one’s blog.