14 DAY TRIAL // Meebo has always been an attractive alternative for the traditional instant messaging clients out there, mostly thanks to the fact that it can be accessed straight from the browser, without the need of installing anything. On the other hand, downloadable applications usually connect to a single network and, even if there are programs that come with multiple networks support, such as Pidgin, consumers choose to use Meebo because it requires only a tiny piece of configuration.
So, it's obvious that Meebo is quite a useful solution, especially for instant messaging fans out there, and the recent stats provided by Hitwise come to confirm this. According to Heather Hopkins, VP Researcher of Hitwise UK, Meebo registered a considerable boost in popularity over the last year and its traffic doubled, being increased with no less than 110 percent.
Meebo was ranked the 122nd website in the "All Categories" section, and the 13th page among the "Social Networking and Forums" category on May 10th, the Hitwise official added. "I compared Meebo's growth and standing compared with the alternatives listed on Meebo Now (an unaffiliated information site about Meebo) and found that Meebo is indeed the biggest of the web based IM players," she explained.
According to the stats provided by Hitwise, MSN's Web Messenger is the second most popular web-based instant messaging client, although it lost quite an important percentage of its visitors.
However, the web-based instant messaging market seems to become more important for both companies and users, as top firms such as Microsoft and Yahoo are getting more involved in it while consumers prefer to use such a product instead of downloading and installing a downloadable application. The Sunnyvale-based giant Yahoo recently improved Web Messenger, a special version of Yahoo Messenger which lets users communicate with their Yahoo contacts straight from the window of their browser.