If you’re like me, you have a American Online, Yahoo, MSN and ICQ instant messaging accounts and have contacts on each that you still maintain. My contacts are grouped by the software product I was working on at the time. I find it funny that my American Online account was established so long ago, I remember picking the name because I thought it could help me impress the ladies online. Uh, yeah. “Croatoa” is such a hot name. Gosh, I was a dork.

So, how does one still use all of these accounts while working for an organization that prevents the use of these applications? (I am, of course, not at all referring to my current company Hewlett-Packard because that would be a breach of some sort of dumb IT policy.) Meebo to the rescue! Meebo is instant messaging from within the browser. There is no client to install and worries about ports needing to be open since it runs over HTTP. It’s similar to GMail chat features but across the different IM vendors and a better user experience. Definetly worth checking out.

Meebo also offers Meebome which is any easy way to embed instant messaging on websites. It’s another way to have folks instantly contact you and one step close to being justin from Justin.tv. Did I mention I think he’s an idiot?