On Friday, Meebo.com, the web-based instant messaging service, announced it was adding support for new IM networks for the first time in over 3 years:

Browser-based chat champ Meebo recently introduced its new Community IM service. Designed for social networking communities, the taskbar-like interface across the bottom of the browser window will be instantly recognizable to Facebook users.

Buddy List on PopSugar:

IM conversation on Flixster:

This kind of service should be easily adaptable to a library environment. Instead of showing which "Buddies" are currently online, which on sites like Flixster refers to a user's Friends or Contacts within the network, a library's implementation could show which Librarians are currently online and available to provide assistance. Something like this:

A re-imagined YLS Library website w/Community IM reference (click to enlarge):

A virtual reference implementation such as this might not fit into Meebo's immediate plans, but using Ajax and XMPP, couldn't a web developer with a lot of free time implement this kind of thing without Meebo? It would certainly be superior to the current MeeboMe widgets used by so many libraries, as Facebook style IM reference would require less screen real estate, would appear on every page of a site, and chat history/sessions would persist as a user navigated to other pages on the site.

Check out this video for a demo of what Flickr is doing with Meebo Community IM:

Meebo Community IM on Flickr from Meebo on Vimeo.

So Yahoo's instant messaging service and MySpace are both down simultaneously. I don't know how long MySpace has been down, but Yahoo Messenger has been unavailable since I got up this morning. That makes this outage quite significant, especially in light of the fact that Yahoo and Microsoft recently began a public test that allows users of one service to contact users of the other. The problems don't seem to have spread to Yahoo's new partner, however, because MSN Messenger remains in full-service. If MySpace wasn't down, or at least significantly malfunctioning 75% of the time, I might think today's outages were part of some larger conspiracy. After all, in case you haven't been paying attention, World War III did start last week. Gotta run. "Batman & Robin" just came on HBO2, and if I don't change the channel soon, my television (and my brain) will self-destruct. Besides, "The Big Lebowski" is coming on Showtime right now. Again. I think I'll watch that instead. Again.