Decipher that chat message

One of the challenges of chat reference, especially if you haven’t been using chat since you were 10 years old like many of our patrons have, is figuring out the acronyms that they use.  (Personally, I pride myself on never using these short hands in chat or texting, but I’m also apparently a snob.)   So [...]

Gabbly

Discovered a new chat service thanks, once again, to my Twitter list.   It’s called Gabbly and it works by putting a chat frame around any webpage.  There’s no embedding, you just put your website URL after Gabbly’s.  So, if for some reason I wanted to host a chat with readers of my blog, I would [...]

Meebo Firefox Sidebar

IM reference is slightly more complicated to set up than one might initially think.   Unlike e-mail addresses hosted by different companies, Instant Messaging accounts can only “talk” to other accounts on that same system.  So, for example, I can e-mail my friends with Gmail accounts with my Yahoo e-mail account, but if I want to [...]

Instantbird

The good folks at Mozilla have gotten into the Instant Messaging game with the release of Instantbird.  I’ve been experimenting with IM using Meebo, but a main problem with it is that it requires the user to keep a browser window open to Meebo and it’s relatively easy to miss an IM notification.   Hopefully Instantbird [...]