Let your viewer talk to you live - Plugoo vs Meebo
Blog, Tips & Tricks, Blah Blah Blah, Technology July 30th, 2007 
Many of you already know how to talk to me live on my blog on my contact page. I thought it will be good to share my experience with you here. There are many online chat tools out there. None of them are as good as MeeboMe.com and Plugoo.com’s chat tools, which allows you to talk to your viewers at real-time when you are online.
Communicate with your viewer online is one of the best ways to keep your viewers coming back. If you can give your viewer a little help, they will show their appreciation in the near future. I just got the favor returned by Sly at http://slyvisions.com/.
I have recently implemented the online chat tools from Meebome.com and Plugoo.com. I was testing both tools on my blog. I finally decide to use Plugoo as my primary online live communication tools. Sly at Slvisions.com just add plugoo to his site, after chatting with me online few times. He decided to do to that. I was chatting with him and go over some neat features of Plugoo. You can read his post at “Chat with Your Blog Readers with Plugoo.”
So why do I use Plugoo over Meebome? I was a big fan of Meebo online messenger tools. My bottom line is to have the following features to fulfill my need to chat with my viewers on my blog.
- No extra Instant messenger installed on my desktop. I already have MSN, AIM, Yahoo, Skype, Google Talk installed. I had enough.
- No software downloads for my viewers. Download software, plug-in or activeX control is very annoying to the viewers. They will not even take a chance to talk to me online.
- Multiple conversations at the same time. This allows me to chat with multiple viewers at the same time.
MeeboMe was my choice, because it did all above and supports multiple conversations. However, I have to login into Meebo.com before I can use it. Now Plugoo support multiple conversations with my MSN messenger without login to any other services. I am switching Plugoo for sure. One thing that MeeBoMe does better is that I can imitate the conversation with my viewers on my end. This is, however, scary to my viewers. Your viewer visit you contact page and suddenly get a popup message from the owner. I don’t think it’s a good idea. 
So how do you have multiple conversations with your viewers in Plugoo? In normal case, you will be chatting with only one viewer at a time in your existing messenger screen. If the second person is sending the chat request, you will receive an external link to open a chat window.
Once the multiple users chat windows is opened, you see multiple users list in the small windows. You can just click and switch between users. As you can see I was chatting with Sly and Test 2.
If you were chatting with one viewer and the other send the message, it flash the new request so you know you’ve got a new message.
If you wish you can kick the viewer, clean the conversation or just close the conversation windows. If viewer left the conversation, you will also be notified.
On plugoo’s web site, it doesn’t really tell you how the multiple conversations work. So I find it out by Sly’s help! Thanks him!
You are welcome to talk to me at any time I am online. Talk to me live!
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13 Responses to “Let your viewer talk to you live - Plugoo vs Meebo”
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July 30th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
Nice post! After trying out the two widgets, I think I would prefer the Meebo one just because of its design. Yes, Plugoo does have many benefits but I prefer the looks and feel of Meebo.
July 30th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
@Sly:
Yes. MeeboMe does look better. And you can use one interface for all your instant message needs. I will leave Meebome on my blog as secondary tool.
July 31st, 2007 at 12:13 am
Nice nice nice !!! you gave me a great idea !! Normally, i hate using widgets on my sidebar coz they make the site loading drastically slow. Once spicypage server went down , and since i had the widget in my site , it made loading time damm slow. I am planning to take off mybloglog widget also. But You gave me a Nice idea of have the chatting widget separately as a link on contact page
July 31st, 2007 at 12:29 am
@Kanak:
That’s why I move it to it’s own page. It will also allow viewers to navigate away from the page. Let me know when you have your great idea showing on your blog.
July 31st, 2007 at 9:35 am
Hey Terence another great post! I like the fact that you really share your knowledge with others on your blog as well as through email. Your one of my favorite bloggers keep up the great work! P.s I finally got the feed burner icon on my page thank you so much for your help
July 31st, 2007 at 9:44 am
@Glen:
You are welcome. I have learned from everyone. I always try to give before taking.
I am glad that you figure that out. I already subscribe to your feed.
September 19th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Great post! I’m a reference librarian and we’ve been using Plugoo on our home page to help people with their research. I experienced my first multi-chat request today and was a bit taken aback. I was pleased to find that your post explained it nicely.
September 19th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
@Bonnie:
I find it very useful too. I got few readers asking question live. It’s a nice tool to communicate your readers. Thank you for stopping by!
October 18th, 2007 at 7:36 am
[…] time, I talked about “Let your viewer talk to you live - Plugoo vs Meebo” for the choice of my communication tool. My pick was Plugoo. Few weeks after that, I now […]
February 23rd, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Nice summary of the differences. The fact that I had to keep Meebo open to use the MeeboMe made the choice clear for me. Plugoo, however, is quite pricey. Also, allowing several IM accounts to be used sequentially in case one is offline would be a good feature for them.
February 26th, 2008 at 6:37 am
@Peter Pajitnov:
Plugoo is pricey? Since they are all free services, I don’t know where the cost came from.
Thank you for visiting.
May 3rd, 2008 at 9:20 am
I have just recently implemented plugoo. While meebo is good but the idea of logging into meebo’s webpage and keeping it open all the time is a pain in the *ss. I love Plugoo because like the author said, I have already enough messengers on my desktop and don’t want to add anything else.
But recently, Plugoo is experiencing delays in loading the applet. I just don’t know if this is just my slow internet connection.
May 7th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
@Manny:
Plugoo has not updated their services or system for a long long time. I pretty much switch to AIM WIMZI for all my communication. Thank you for stopping by!