Meebo
Photo credit: Meebo, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The browser tab that ran AIM, MSN, Yahoo and ICQ all at once — no download, no install, no getting caught. On locked-down school and library computers, Meebo was the loophole: the IT department could block installers, but the browser was always open.
Sandy Jen, Seth Sternberg, and Elaine Wherry founded Meebo in September 2005, when instant messaging was a mess of silos — AIM couldn't talk to MSN, MSN couldn't talk to Yahoo, and each demanded its own installed client. Meebo's insight was simple and radical: run them all in a browser tab. Eventually it pulled AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, MySpaceIM, Facebook Chat, and Google Talk into a single window.
That mattered most where installs were forbidden. On school, library, and office computers, Meebo slipped past the restrictions — it was just a website — and a generation of students kept their buddy lists alive from the computer lab. For a few years it was one of the web's great everyday utilities: not a destination, a lifeline.
Google announced it was acquiring Meebo on June 4, 2012, and shut down every Meebo product except the site-toolbar Meebo Bar a month later; the Bar followed on June 6, 2013. The unified-messenger dream didn't die because it was solved — everyone just ended up in one silo after all.
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