Dear Meebo,
You have a problem. You used to be a great company, you used to be a personal favorite of mine. Your IM services used to be second to none. When I used AIM, MSN, Yahoo, I preferred to use your web client instead of installing the company created tools onto my pc. You made it easy for when I would move to different computers and wanted to talk with my friends, but then the ecosystem changed, people started not using AIM, MSN, Yahoo and people started switching to gchat, and facebook chat, people became conscious as to how many tabs they had opened and stopped going to meebo.com.
You tried to adapt, you thought you had this great idea to let people “check-in” like they did with foursquare, but instead of places they’d use websites. It’s a great idea in theory, users could become “mayors” of websites, earn bonuses discounts, etc.. But you’re going about it all wrong, this Meebo Bar, is a clunky, javascript heavy, slows down my browser, piece of s***.
I use a top of the line macbook with SSD, and pc workstation in my office. Both computers have the latest and greatest browsers, but every meebo site I goto, once I see that bar at the bottom I let out a huge sigh.
TMZ thankfully has turned off that stupid drag-to-share “feature” of your bar, nothing is more fun on my computer when it has to generate a drop shadow underneath every image, video, or photo on that site, and accidentally clicking and dragging everything cause the window to turn dark and those 3 or 4 little “tweet this” “facebook this” “share this” would pop up.
Was this said in a meeting? If we slow down peoples browsers to a crawl they won’t be able to wait to come back to my website. But I bet those added microseconds add up in my analytics, giving me the illusion that the user has been on my site longer than they want to.
And the AD’s! Here’s what your bar reminds me of and ANYONE who watches tv can relate to this, say you’re watching tv, a great show, and then out of the corner there becomes a dancing little car or some advertisement that drives across the screen. You have successfully created one item everyone hates for TV and moved it to the web environment.
@davedenisMeebo, [mee-bow] verbTo annoy or irritate web site visitors with distracting and tasteless interface elements
— Jesse Weisbeck (@jlweisbeck) April 24, 2012
And don’t ever leave your mouse hovering over the bar, a couple seconds hovering over the wrong part and a massive FULL SCREEN advert poped up.
The sad thing is their ad sales department appears to be targeting specific websites with users who 1) really don’t care about checking in, and 2) won’t even have a clue about what the purpose of that bar is, I bet there’s a percentage of users that thing it’s some sort of spyware.
But there is potential for this it has the potential to work on my network of sites, and let users actively fight over who comes to the site more often, or who logs in more often. But it is far far from being there.
And if you do stumble upon a website that has one, gizmodo has a great article on how to remove it.
Sincerely,
Who Gave Them Money.
[cb]Meebo[/cb]
