"Meebo? What's That?"

If you take a look a bit further down at our sidebar, you'll see a little doohickey inviting you to Meebo Me. It's not dirrty, I promise. So, what the heck is Meebo, you ask? Meebo is, as Time puts it in their 50 Coolest Websites of 2006 feature,

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. Available in four dozen languages.

Pretty sweet, huh? (Emphasis added, btw.) I use both AIM and GTalk, and I love not having to mess around with downloading them to my home or work computers. I can log in to Meebo from any internet-capable computer, and because I signed up for a Meebo account (you can use the site without one, which is nice -- a try before you buy feature), the service saves all of my chats, in every platform, with whomever I chat with.

MeeboMe is Meebo's additional service that places a Meebo interface (or widget) right on this blog -- so if you're visiting and see that I'm signed into Meebo, you can IM me! It's just another way of keeping in touch with our Gentle Readers. C'mon, you know you wanna!