Experimental web app could bring AIM chat to iPhone

Talking about meebo... http://blog.meebo.com/?p=323

Well you can go ahead and give this dude your AIM credentials and chat logs over unencrypted HTTP if you want to; me maybe not so much.

Background events? Who needs em!

#20 - Yes, you're the only one. I've used text chat in both SMS and AIM form on my various phones for years. It's been invaluable. "Hey, send me the text from that email." and "What was that quote?" Etc. Sometimes you're in a meeting or a movie or whatever and you can get the information without making a call. The Sidekick II and III which I used really nailed the chatting features, I might have to pick up the new Sidekick when that comes out. I'm starting to get really wary about all of this screen-typing stuff. We'll see how the reports are.

But yes, text-chatting and messaging are not going away.

Meebo slows my G4 Powerbook to a crawl. Much better in Safari 3 than in Firefox, but no way it's going to work on the iPhone.

I thought Jobs was proud that the iPhone runs 'Mac OS X" .. what kind of retarded OS X is this?

the only thing it runs is Safari and that too WITHOUT FLASH!

These kids are spending $600+ on this worthless novelty and they also have to beg to get half decent apps that $50 Nokias have built-in?

I am already seeing online petitions (which if anything brings pity) to port certain apps for iPhone ... sad.

Am I the only who thinks text chat over a PHONE is absurd? I know kids run up huge bills doing it, but wouldn't a voice chat (seeing as it's a phone) be faster and cheaper? Text chat was designed to cope with the limitations of the Web in its early days. I suppose the next big development will be voice recognition for text chat so that you don't need to strain your thumbs typing. By the time we have BrainPals capable of sending thought messages in an almost telepathic way, we'll still have developers coming up with ways to turn it into text!

Actually, the new beta for Yahoo chat web access seems to work with Safari 3. And Yahoo has a welcome page saying it will work with Windows Live Messenger, too.

http://webmessenger.yahoo.com/

This is one of the main reasons I'm not getting an iPhone. It's unforgiveable that they are releasing a phone that is supposedly "the full internet, on your phone ... not some watered-down version", yet it doesn't offer any sort of iChat/AIM functionality built-in. AIM Express sucks bigtime on mobile phones. Couple that with the low memory and the lack of 3G and I'm out until they fix 'em. If it had some sort of instant messaging function, I might be persuaded, but this was the nail in the coffin.

I wondered about Jabber - which is what, incidentally, GMail uses for chat. Googling around I find there is an open-source implementation of a Jabber web application that, on the client-side, requires only HTML and JavaScript.

http://jwchat.sourceforge.net/

I wonder if Safari's JavaScript-support is up to the task. If you look at the "Supported Browsers" link, they say:

"Support for safari coming soon..."

We have a two-way thing if the developers of this application are trying to meet Safari, and Apple's engineers are steadily improving Safari's JavaScript support at the same time. I guess it's possible this application may even work right now with Safari 3.

any phone that can find alternative (and free) ways of communication using WiFi can skip some cash from the carrier network and they won't like Skype or chat progs ported to iphones and/or competition. The question is how far will they go hardwiring obstacles into the phone design without making them ... useless dumbphones.