Monday, July 2, 2007

meebo identities

Hi Everyone,

Apparently, IT is testing the meebo widgets. When I had my account and several other pages open Friday, I didn't see or hear that new messages were coming in. The tester got "cute" and typed some not-so-pleasant things indicating he was angry at my lack of response.

That got me to thinking, have you seen anything that will show who the sender is?

Over the weekend, I realized he could be anonymous by sending the message from the widget on my blog. At least that's what I'm guessing! But if he had his own IM account and had to use a specific IM address, we'd be able to tell who messages were coming from, right?

And in thinking of this as a tool for Reference, if we have to forward messages to someone else to handle how will they know who to reply to?

Meg

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Meg, I am sorry you had such an ugly Meebo experience! As for students who want our assistance, I am sure they will quite willingly provide their email addresses and any other contact information a librarian might deem necessary.

Stephanie Davis-Kahl said...

Good questions....I agree with Sarah that if anyone needed follow up, users would be willing to provide their contact information. This makes me think, though - does anyone know of any documentation other libraries have created about these and other issues re using meebo for reference? I think those would be helpful in planning for the fall.

Suzanne said...

If someone posts through the widget it shows up in Meebo as a number - meeboguest#######. If it comes through an IM service like yahoo then you see their yahoo id.

In order to know that you are receiving a message, make sure the sound is turned on in your preferences. I could not get the sound to work in IE, but it did work in Firefox.

Some other things to explore, we could create a side bar in Firefox so that Meebo could display on the left side and then you could use the browser window on the right for other things.