Now, at least one team - the minds behind BabelWith.me - has developed the functionality into a cool, useful chat application that capably (if not perfectly) translates chats in real time. The service enables simultaneous communication in up to 45 different languages. It's kind of like the U.N. of IM.

The chat dialog shows both the original text as well as the Google-powered translation. Granted, the translations aren't perfect; Google doesn't know how to deal with "pig latin" or "pommes frites." But it's manageable and functional, for the most part.

We tested it out and do wish the program had a timestamp feature and some kind of notification or alert. Unnoticed chats went ignored with nary a flash, blink, or beep until we came back to the window or tab containing the chat room. We did love that the program gave both the original text (in orange italics) underneath the translated version. And of course, all the static text in the chat is translated, as well.

We were also told by the BabelWith.me team, "The launch was moved up to offer free multilanguage communication with those in Iran." Check out this chat set up specifically for discussion of the Iran election and aftermath.

BabelWith.me is a product of the non-profit organization LifeChurch.tv.

"SEO has been a great way for web sites to acquire new users, and will continue to be," said CEO Seth Sternberg in am email last night. "At the same time, site owners are looking for the next great way to attract additional users. i think that 'social graph optimization' can be the next SEO - making it really easy for your users to share content from your site to their friends, be they on social networks, IM networks, in email, etc."

Even cooler is the sharing option in the Meebo bar across the lower part of the screen. This feature enables users to share links via any IM service connected to their Meebo account as well as via Twitter, Facebook, and email. The feature reminds us a lot of Gmail Labs' addition of Google Search to email and chat.

This is what happens when the "Share" button in the Meebo bar is clicked:

Interested parties can get a closer look at features and functionality in this demo video:

Sites adopting the new tech from Meebo are expected to see significant spikes in user engagement. Partner sites announced today include Aeria Games, BakeSpace, Chictini, Fragegg, GamerNook, JamLegend, PlayedOnline, and SparkPeople.

The MySpace team worked with Meebo to assist with its integration. The Facebook integration relies on Facebook Chat for Pidgin, an open source IM project.

With the addition of these massive user bases, Meebo becomes - arguably - the premiere service for managing all of your IM conversations in one place. That's impressive in and of itself. But it also hints at something even more interesting for the future with Meebo's Community IM initiative.

What's Community IM? It's a Meebo project that will introduce Web-based IM features to a number of community oriented sites over the coming months, allowing users of those sites to engage in IM conversations when visiting their favorite Web sites.

What's more, it's a concept that's strikingly similar to Facebook's chat implementation. And that's where adding Facebook access gets really interesting.

With Community IM, Facebook users - who are already familiar with concept of logging into a Web site and chatting with friends - will now have access to their Facebook friends through Meebo when visiting any number of sites on the Web. Same goes for MySpace. That means sharing something with Facebook or MySpace contacts becomes as easy as firing off an IM message through Meebo. No more bookmarklets or cutting, logging in, and pasting. Now, it's as simple as sending an IM.

So, without much fanfare - and much in the same way Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and the Open Stack are extending the reach of the social graph - it looks like Meebo just moved the Web-based IM conversations of millions of users and their contacts beyond the walled gardens of social networks to the Web at large. And that's pretty exciting.

To try the new Meebo Facebook and MySpace access, log into your Meebo account and add the new accounts to your profile. Or visit Meebo and log into your Facebook and MySpace accounts from there.

Now, you may have the option to rectify that situation with a new Gmail Labs feature that adds SMS messaging to Gmail chat.

How do you use it? After activating the feature through Google Labs, simply establish a mobile phone number for the contact with whom you want to exchange SMS messages. And begin firing messages their way.

The mobile user will receive a message from a unique phone number beginning with the 406 area code. So they'll be able to save it to their contacts and send you messages in the future. If they don't want to be getting messages from you, they have the option to block them.

With the new feature, you'll be able to continue conversations with people who have left their computer mid-conversation. What's more, the next time you get an inbound SMS message while you're sitting in front of your machine, you'll also be able to jump into Gmail chat to converse using your full keyboard - instead of your mobile. And that may mean a more meaningful conversation for both of you.

But Apple's shortcoming in terms of a universal IM client is the iPhone development community's gain. And any number of folks are rushing to fill that void. One recently released mobile IM client appears to have a fighting chance: Nimbuzz.

But the thing that sold me on Nimbuzz didn't have anything to do with the IM functionality. It had to do with being able to change the perspective on the client by shifting to landscape mode. Having the ability to use the wider keyboard made sending messages even easier. And typos were far fewer than on the traditional upright screen (which I'm sure the folks to whom I'm sending messages greatly appreciate).

Nimbuzz for the iPhone currently supports Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger (MSN), Google Talk, Facebook, MySpace, Gadu-Gadu, studiVZ, and Hyves. The mobile app is also available for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and a number of other popular handsets.

For more information, visit Nimbuzz or download the free Nimbuzz app from the App Store.

If you're a service like Web-based IM leader Meebo, you build an app to enhance the functionality of the Web-based service. And that's exactly what they've done with Meebo for Android.

Even more importantly, Android allows Meebo to deliver an application that can't live on the iPhone platform today. Why? Because of the iPhone's inability to run multiple applications simultaneously. "Running another iPhone application in the background" is a foreign concept - unless you're the owner of a jailbroken phone.

While glimpses of the Meebo app have been available for months, today marks the first opportunity for G1 users to download the app to their handset from the Android Market.

Meebo - which boasts traffic of more than 5 billion messages per month - continues to advance their service. This mobile offering marks another step forward in their continuing efforts to make the service more accessible to more people. The Android release follows closely on the heels of their Community IM partnership announcement which promises exponential growth in the number of Meebo users over the coming months.

And while the Android app might not increase the user base as drastically as Community IM, it's still a significant step in taking advantage of Android features that its closest competitor currently lacks.

These days, a number of developers seem to be building mobile apps simply because they can. Meebo for Android, however, avoids the pitfall of simply "reiterating existing services" by taking a step forward in augmenting Meebo's functionality using the Android platform.

Google Talk is probably one of the few messaging clients that doesn't have a way for you to interact with other Google Talk users unless you know their email address. GTalk Profile provides the perfect solution to this problem. Using Google Maps, GTalk Profile allows users to plot where they are on a map and also find other users around the world. Simply type your city and state into the search box and GTalk Profile will provide you with a list of users near you along with a description of each user. Clicking on a name takes you to a profile page where you'll find a longer description, photos, interests, location, and the option to request a user's Google Talk information.

Sign Up for GTalk Profile

Currently the most active countries seem to be Europe, Africa and South America. The United States is the least active country on GTalk Profile. Hopefully that will change soon. GTalk Profile is a great way to expand your Google contacts, though we'd be careful about accepting any and every request on this service.

Meebo, the leading "IM in the browser" play, realizes this. And with Community IM, they're hoping to capitalize on it, by incorporating XMPP/Jabber IM into any Web-based community. If early numbers are any indication, they're going to be wildly successful.

So how many users could that long-tail of communities garner for Meebo? Based on comScore Media Metrix, Meebo estimates the potential size of the partner network to have an unduplicated global reach of 72.9 million with more than 26 million of those users in the US.

Slated to launch this fall, the movie site Flixster will be the first out of the gates on the platform.

And that's just the beginning. With the types of communities Meebo is targeting, there's a great deal more room to grow once the service is launched to the public:

"If you have an online community with over 20K daily users, Meebo can add IM to your website. Users will be able to chat with other community members as well as buddies outside your network, directly from your site."

Perhaps even more impressive is Meebo's foresight to build its solution on an open foundation. Running on a XMPP/Jabber backbone, Meebo Community IM will be able to connect directly with other popular IM networks. AIM, MSN, Google Talk, and Yahoo! will all be available options. What's more, XMPP will enable them to federate relationships across the various partners, so that a user from one community will be able to communicate with users on another community.

Needless to say, the combination of the extensible technology and the sheer volume of online communities that could choose to adopt this solution translate into a great deal of potential for Meebo.

It's no wonder Meebo's valuation sits north of $200 million.

All in all, Meebo is projecting huge numbers, already. And the estimates of the potential could get astronomical. But, it's also evident that a yet-to-be-launched solution can be met with any amount of skepticism. So where does that put us?

Rest assured, this isn't the first time Meebo has been saddled with "it can't be done." After more than three years of proving their detractors wrong, we remain convinced that Meebo is going to succeed.

This incredibly customizable program lets you chat seamlessly across almost every IM network you can think of - the absence of interoperability becomes almost inconsequential after you sign up for an account on each service and tell Adium to log in to each. We are very excited about the upgrade.

Facebook Integration

We're not sure how likely to use Facebook chat we are, but we know that a lot of people do use it. We'll now be reachable that way too. By telling Adium to connect to social networking status messages, we're also now seeing peoples' Facebook status in Growl notification. That's pretty nice. Not something we'd want for Twitter, but for the less frequently updated Facebook messages that makes sense.

Effective interoperability with Facebook IM makes us think we should take our friend accepting a little more seriously there. Unfortunately, one known issue is that Facebook doesn't want to keep you logged in when you're also logged in via Adium. We hope that can be solved quickly.

Search

One of the most frustrating things about Adium has been that by tying together contacts lists across multiple services, it creates a very long aggregate list. It can be hard to find anyone in particular when you want to initiate a chat. No longer! The new version of Adium solves this UI scaling problem by bringing up a nice search bar when you hit the command-F keys.

There's So Much to Do With Adium!

Seven months in the making, this update to Adium is a big one. There's sure to be more on the way soon (many people are hoping that video and audio chat will be enabled someday) but in the meantime, check out AdiumXtras, the site where you can find all kinds of skins, plug-ins and other Adium fun.

The Palringo app for the iPhone is small enough to download over Edge or 3G. To get started you'll need to have a Palringo account. If you don't already have one, there's a link available in the app that will take you to the registration site. Registration is quick and easy and no confirmation email is necessary to respond to.

Supported services for Palringo include:

• Windows Live Messenger
• Yahoo! Messenger
• AIM
• Gadu-Gadu
• ICQ
• XMPP / Jabber
• Google Talk
• iChat

Conversing with Friends

The user interface for Palringo is fantastic! Adding networks and friends to each of the services is quick and easy. All of your online contacts are shown together alphabetically regardless of service. When you receive a message, you'll see a small mail icon pop up in the lower left corner accompanied by a chirping notification sound. Press the mail icon and you'll see a list of all your conversations along with a notification of which ones have new messages. You can leave conversations open and simply swipe your finger across the screen to switch from one conversation to another. You can also send an image from your camera or albums on your iPhone to friends.

Goodbye AOL and Hello Palringo

Palringo for the iPhone is a great application to have and highly recommended. According to Palringo's description of the app,

"Using Palringo uses hardly any data: just one megabyte is sufficient for Palringo to send and receive the equivalent of about 4500 SMS messages, 32 picture messages, or up to 15 minutes of voice messages."

What Meebone basically does is display the Meebo web app in an AIR window, somewhat akin to what Fluid does on the Mac.

As we reported in March, Meebo is becoming more and more of a mainstream application and chances are that quite a few users are using it on their desktops already and not just on the go, so having a desktop client for it actually makes sense for a lot of users. It effectively clones the look and feel of the web app, so even novice users will feel right at home with Meebone.

While it might not be a good choice for IM power users, Meebone would be a great choice for those who are looking for a basic IM client that can handle multiple accounts and services.

Recently Yahoo and Google announced a partnership for advertising. Yahoo will run advertisements provided by Google alongside the companies own advertisements. However, what was overlooked was the statement that both companies "agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant-messaging services, bringing easier and broader communication to users".

The Problem

Companies like Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft try to do things that are beneficial for their entire community and not just for small portions of it. Stephan Shankland noted that:

"AOL said in a statement, in effect, that I am indeed an anomaly. "We have no evidence that interoperating with other consumer IM services is of great interest to AIM users," the company said."

This may come as a huge "ouch!" to early adopters, social media fanatics, and generally those that network online 24/7. Such users only represent a small portion of these immense networks. While they may be the users that push the envelope and can help the tools that these companies produce become better and more productive, AOL understands that the average users probably won't care.

In acknowledging this, interoperability becomes more of a distant dream than a reality. In layman's terms, it seems interoperability won't happen unless there's a major push from the majority of users or it's somehow beneficial financially for any of the parties involved. This may be a sad conclusion for some.

What it Could Mean

If Yahoo and Google do open up their respective clients to one another, this will be a very beneficial move to both parties because they have already integrated other platforms: Yahoo with Live Messenger and Google with AIM. Also, If it does happen users will at least have the option to pick between the two and get the best of the majority of these networks. If you have the majority of your contacts on Yahoo and Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger would be the best platform for you with the added benefit of Google Talk interoperability. If you have more contacts on Google and AIM, then Google Talk would be the better choice with the benefit of integrating your Yahoo contacts too.

However, is this really enough? I don't think it'll keep users from using third party clients that enable interoperability between all of these networks and more. Digsby is poised to take a serious amount from the market share of the standard clients because of its interoperability not only with IM clients, but also because of the integrated social networks and even email. It makes me wonder if maybe Digsby is poised to be the "Firefox" of instant messaging if the dominating players aren't careful. What do you think?

See also: Poll: Which Instant Messaging Client(s) Do You Use?

Adium has recently integrated Facebook chat into the beta version of the IM client. The client allows you to see the default profile image and your friend's Facebook status. Unfortunately, Adium is only for Mac OS X (sorry Windows users).

Gabtastik

Gabtastik is a Site Specific Browser (SSB) for web chat services similar to Mozilla's Prism project. Supported chat services so far are Facebook chat and Google Talk. Gabtaskit is available for both Windows and OS X. However, keep in mind that Gabtastik doesn't bring any new features to Facebook chat. You're still restricted to the minimalistic interface.

Digsby

Digsby is a multi-service instant messsaging client that supports an enormous list of services from the usual suspects like AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and Google Talk, to social networks such as Twitter, Myspace and Facebook. Among the plethora of social networks and IM accounts, you can also manage your email accounts via Digsby. Last month, developers of Digsby became the first to take Facebook chat outside of Facebook. Digsby FTW?

Bonus Ways

Other ways to run Facebook chat outside of the social network's homepage include running Facebook chat in your Firefox sidebar or using the Pidgin IM client Facebook chat plugin. On another note, while you can't run Facebook chat in Windows Live messenger (yet?), you can run Windows Live Messenger in Facebook with the Live Messenger Facebook app.

Check out these great tools and let us know what you're using to get Facebook chat out of the walled garden.

• IM Remote - Screen to screen desktop sharing over AIM.
• IM Loud: This plugin reads IMs out loud to the user.
• IM Whiteboard: Use AIM as a whiteboard and simultaneously draw with buddies.
• LinkPreview: Thumbnail link previews when hovering over a link sent to you in chat.
• Free2IM: Possibly one of the most useful applications in the entire bunch, Free2IM provides automatic, on-the-fly language translation back and forth over IM. That's something we had on our wish list last March when Google released its AJAX Language API.

• Infomess: Chat and share videos at the same time.
• Share-A-Map: Share and collaboratively edit MapQuest maps. Giving someone directions will never be the same...
• PopsChat: Bound to score points with TopCoder users, this plugin brings AIM chat and features to the TopCoder Arena (a chat and messaging area).
• FeedReader: An RSS feedreader for AIM.

You can view the entire list of eligible submissions on the competition page.

I don't know that this can be called interoperability, but it's a nice touch. No corresponding announcement about logging into Google Talk through AIM has been made yet by the AIM team - who apparently haven't been up to much since announcing their quiet support for OpenID more than a year ago. I tease, but come on guys, can we get some fireworks occasionally?