Solo Technology

Saw a Mabber review over on TechCrunch earlier this week where the author went (as Rich would say) all girly-girl giggly over it. End of the article mentioned some beta spots so I sent in my email and, the next day, received my beta invite. (and now I have 10 invites to offer, just leave a comment or email me).

I have pretty mixed feelings about it so far so I’ll start by listing what I like and don’t like and see if that helps me sort out where I’m at:

Likes:

• Runs in a seperate, pop-up window. In other words, it can be outside of the browser and looks like any other chat client.
• Logging! Yes, finally, a web im thingy that supports logging. That is huge to me.
• Easily rename folks in your lists via a popup menu.
• Interface is nice. I won’t say it is nicer than Meebo’s, but it is different and certainly not hard on the eyes.
• While I normally disable IM sound features immediately as an extreme annoyance, I have to say I dig the sounds that mabber uses.  And that’s good, as you don’t get any blinking title bars to alert when someone replied.  Although, sometimes it seems to pop the chat window to the front, that doesn’t seem to always happen.

Dislikes:

• Woof. The site and general navigation is rather sluggish.
• Managing contacts and connections to other services is largely done via right-clicking and context menus. My firefox browser sometimes intercepts those and show the built-in right-click menu on top of (thus hiding) the mabber menu. Amusingly enough, this is not an issue with ie7beta2 (which seems to run this generally ok, but with some odd random disconnects…)
• No way, that I’ve found, to change MY name as shown to other chat clients. That’s a bummer.
• While I don’t mind the interface, after using it and looking at it for a few hours I think I’d like to be able to adjust some colors… the “peach gradient” wears on me a bit.
• minor: I miss the “other party is typing” type message.

There’s a mobile component to it as well, and that may be where it gets much more exciting (or slower…) but I don’t have a modern enough phone to even bother. Didn’t find much about phone requirements, but I noticed the download for it is a .jar file, so that leaves me out (yeah, my phone runs java mobile stuff. very very slowly).

Is it a meebo killer? I dunno yet. If you’re looking for another way to access your IM from anything with a browser or mobile jre, this is worth a look.

8 Responses to “A very quick look at Mabber”

1. Nico on February 26th, 2006 9:17 am
   

   thanks for your input. We will introduce tabbed messaging next week which will hopefully get rid of the sluggish behavior you experienced.

2. Rich G. on February 26th, 2006 2:39 pm
   

   There are a lot of the ajax type sites out there right now that really think that colors are something we’ll all agree on, and honestly… it’s not the case. I’ll quit using an otherwise good program due to aesthetics. Stupid of me I know, but there you are. If I can’t stand looking at it, and after a while there are a LOT of things I can’t stand looking at, I’ll wander off.

   Color changing isn’t hard to add I wouldn’t think and I don’t know why more ppl don’t add it. Yes. I know they’re working on ‘real’ features, but for some of us, hating what something looks like is a stumbling block… and peach? I don’t think so.

   Sorry, didn’t mean to go off on a rant there, but there’s no way a program released today shouldn’t be skinnable at best (the ideal is skins as versatile as winamp) but at worst the colors should be able to be changed by the user. Anything less is pththththhtht.

3. John on February 26th, 2006 5:35 pm
   

   Hi, if you’ve any Mabber invites left, I’d sure appreciate one. Thanks in adv.
   JM

4. JK on February 27th, 2006 1:34 am
   

   Hi, would sure appreciate it if you could pass on one invite. Thanks!

   Have been trying to use this other mobile messaging application, IM+. But it never seem to connect.

5. LUCY on March 30th, 2006 9:20 am
   

   Hi! I would really appreciatte if you could send one mabber invite my way…
   Thanks in advance
   lucgarza@yahoo.com

6. » pingback » Meebo Goes Beta » Solo Technology on November 4th, 2006 6:59 pm
   
   
7. djokdja on July 7th, 2007 9:15 am
   

   I’ve tried to hard to get mabber. So, please invite me to get mabber account. I’ll appreciate you when you give me one. Thanks!

8. Chris on July 7th, 2007 9:54 am
   

   djokdja - have you tried http://www.mabber.com/web_reg.php yet?

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