Site Archives IM

Meebo Bar for Libraries


A lot of libraries use widgets on their pages to answer virtual reference questions. They use things like Meebo, Digsby, AIM, and the very cool Library H3LP.  Yet recently Meebo co-founder Seth Sternberg, one of the pioneers of widgets on the web, pretty much said that widgets suck. His argument was that widgets can’t be easily updated [...]

Digsby for Reference


A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about using Pidgin and Meebo for our IM Reference service.  They have worked fairly well and the service gets a lot of use, but there have been a few problems.  Pidgin would crash unexpectedly which was mildly annoying. The biggest problem though, was that users could leave [...]

Pidgin more stable?


We use Pidgin at the reference desk to monitor our meebo widgets and IM accounts, so I was glad to see that the latest version fixed a number of bugs.  Pidgin tended to crash once or twice a day which wasn’t devastating, but it was still pretty annoying.  I guess nothing is perfect.  Anyway, I [...]