My family is pretty non-technical and its unclear how I got my engineering streak. My father prints out and mails my blog entries to my grandmother in Mineola, Texas and my mother gets major kudos for creating her first spreadsheet in Excel a few weeks ago. About a month into meebo’s launch, I realized that my parents had a vision of meebo servers packed into my apartment. So just to explain the very basics to my parents and also to anyone else who might be interested, I thought I’d give a very basic overview of what happens when someone logs into meebo.
When meebo first started, we had two tiny servers (ah, the good old days!). However, even then, we didn’t keep them in my apartment. Sandy would be pretty upset if I tripped over a cord and the meebo service went down. No good!
Most larger websites keep their servers in a remote bunker or a building called a colocation facility. Think of racks and racks and racks of computers with sophisticated security systems, back-up generators, and complex ventilation systems — it’s surprisingly similar to what was portrayed in The Minority Report. The people who maintain these facilities (for us it’s Simon from meebo and Dan and Steve from Layer42) spend their time thinking about how the air shooting out of one server affects its neighbor and they all wear pagers programmed to alert them when a hard drive dies or there’s a hiccup in the network. The bulk of meebo’s servers live in a colocation facility in Santa Clara, California.
So how does my father’s computer in Durango, Colorado connect with meebo? There are long underground cables owned by companies like AT&T and Verizon that connect the East and West Coast and run underneath the oceans to connect continents. The communication between computers is very similar to how old-fashioned telephone networks functioned. When the telephone was first introduced, human operators would answer calls, ask the caller who they wanted to reach, and then physically plug a cable into the right socket to make that connection happen. The internet operates similarly except that the human operators have been replaced by routers. Routers act like the human operators many years ago by tracking neighboring routers, traffic flow, and generally figuring out the fastest way to get meebo’s data to your computer.
However, the communication process doesn’t stop when a user’s computer is talking with a meebo server. When a meebo user starts an IM session, meebo creates another network connection with AOL, Jabber, MSN, and Yahoo’s services which are located in different colocation facilities. meebo does this by relying upon an open-source client called GAIM that is popular among Linux users. GAIM can connect with all of the major IM networks and was written as a desktop application. Sandy has heavily modified and optimized GAIM so that we can run many, many instances of GAIM on each server. Fortunately, the communication back and forth between a user’s computer, meebo’s servers, and the IM network happens very quickly — sending and receiving messages is virtually instantaneous.
There’s one other thing that makes meebo unique: meebo’s web pages are dynamic. This means meebo can display new content (like an IM message or a new buddy notification) without refreshing the page. This is what developers refer to as “Ajax.” Traditional webpages only talk to the servers when you click a button, refresh the page, or navigate to a new url. However, Ajax-enabled webpages can talk to the servers at any time by using XMLHttpRequest objects.
There are two basic ways that people have used Ajax to create a real-time experience. One is to poll the server every 3-4 seconds and ask the server if there are any new updates. This technically works but is inelegant and means that the user might have to wait as much as 3-4 seconds to receive a new IM message (and 3-4 seconds seems like a really long time when you are chatting!).
The second technique is generally referred to as long-polling. It works much like polling, except that instead of the server returning immediately, the server keeps the connection open until it has a new update. This means that an IM message can be pushed to the meebo window as soon as it is available. Alex Russell recently coined the long-polling method “Comet” (Ajax & Comet? – you can tell Alex has a good sense of humor).
So that’s the basic meebo communication flow in a nutshell. I’m trying to talk Sandy into writing about why you see www3, www4, www5, etc in meebo’s url address in an upcoming post. Mom & Dad, no worries — meebo won’t go down if I blow a fuse while vacuuming my apartment! meebo is safe and sound in our colocation facility.
Thanks for reading. Hope this was interesting for a few of you!
-Elaine
[ comments ] [ past blogs ]
April 9th, 2006 at 11:05 pm
Hi Elaine,
fabulous writeup! Not just the basics of hosting but more
April 9th, 2006 at 11:28 pm
Have any of the improvements to libgaim been fed upstream?
April 9th, 2006 at 11:45 pm
Really clean explanation for laymen. Keep it up.
April 10th, 2006 at 12:02 am
really great way 2 share n intresting story bout meebo……………good info though ……..bout the colocation facility……….
April 10th, 2006 at 12:31 am
hi Chris,
a lot of our improvements have been geared towards making meebo a more optimized web app, and that means things like stripping out much of the UI components (GTK) and removing functionality that meebo currently does not support. much of the “improvements” have been very meebo-specific
we’ve submitted a few bugs in the past, but the folks behind the GAIM project are really great at what they do.
sandy
April 10th, 2006 at 12:32 am
Hi Elaine,
Your writeup made was great and it made me post my first comment. It also reminded me of my parents!
April 10th, 2006 at 1:17 am
Great explanation. Good to hear about Comet being used in the real world. Thanks!
April 10th, 2006 at 1:26 am
Hi….
Its really very very Interesting to know how meebo works….
Very good write up……
April 10th, 2006 at 1:57 am
Hi…,
You have put the technical details in a very simplistic manner. Keep up the good work.
April 10th, 2006 at 1:57 am
Hi.
Meebo rocks. Excelent ideea. Now i can use yahoo messenger from work
April 10th, 2006 at 2:32 am
Very neat explanation to understand how meebo works basically. Found this blog to be an very intresting .Keep up the great work !!!
April 10th, 2006 at 2:40 am
this is so cool! i enjoyed reading this entry, thanks!
April 10th, 2006 at 2:54 am
i have an understanding of how webservices work since i’m working in a webdeveloping companie (ie ending means small) (though not completely a tech guy).. but it’s a bit of pleasure to read it – gives a feeling of smth personal. kind of.
April 10th, 2006 at 4:02 am
Great tech!.. but there is still more to be done.. softwares like “Websense” can easily block meebo from opening at places where messengers are banned (in offices for eg.). Hence the biggest advantage of using such an application is lost.. however as meebo enables users to chat on multiple messenger, its a killer app.
some innovation is required to get away with softwares like “Websense”
April 10th, 2006 at 5:22 am
thanks elaine…its fabulous for us “semi” (or even ‘non’) techies to be able to learn this stuff in plain language!…..Ajax isn’t just for scrubbing kitchens anymore!…..and yes, i’d like to learn why i’m on www14 now too! lol!…..
April 10th, 2006 at 5:43 am
technical explanations make me feel warm and fuzzy inside =D so does the fact that we got like 37 (i think?) different servers to run meebo on =}
I know when we get to www52.meebo.com i’ll be on that one like glue =p
April 10th, 2006 at 6:34 am
I really enoyed this. I wondered what was going on in the back ground. I am a programmer and debugger for a much older system so I had a basic understanding. I thought this was really cool. Keep up the good work!
April 10th, 2006 at 6:53 am
Great explanation… I learn something and many things were clarified. Thanks.
April 10th, 2006 at 7:23 am
Much appreciated info on the backend of Meebo! Thanks a lot
April 10th, 2006 at 7:27 am
Hi ,
The best thing is that the very complex things were explained which such an ease which is really worth praise and even those who already knew it couldnt control smiles on their faces after reading it . Keep on the good work
April 10th, 2006 at 7:35 am
I have been following
meebo’s traffic and its simply great that its increasing day by day.. good going..
Here is something I have problem with, my soundcard has crashed and it will take sometime for me to replace it with a new one.. now, when I minimize my meebo window there is no way for me to know if someone has IMed me.. until I don’t see the title on the window rotating.. But that does not help as it will not catch my attention until and unless I see it.. if you have something like.. when meebo window is minimized and someone IMs me it should glow.. Ok this can be done – may be using the same concept like.. firefox… it glows when a operation on that page fails.. like when I try to reach an invalid web address… Let me know if you need more help on this.. but I am sure you guys can figure it out..
April 10th, 2006 at 7:41 am
Do you remember the Push tecnology used to create channel on the win95 ? the idea was on the wild from many years, but quite unusable, in the web but now is really cool.
i hope you will at some point integrate some feature extra… like sending the image of the desktop or some cool way to organize contacts (by using some graph rappresentation)
ok feel free to ignore this confused post
http://treepie.sf.net
April 10th, 2006 at 7:45 am
Glad to know this info about Meebo, hope to read what you’re currenlty working on.
April 10th, 2006 at 7:56 am
Hey Guys!!!
Thanks a Lot!!! I was having problems to connect to any of my Messengers in my Job, because the Proxy server is denying any Messenger Service, but someone advice me to try meebo and I was really surprissed when I saw it Working….
Thanks for this usefull and incredible service you provide to people!!.
Cheers.
April 10th, 2006 at 8:14 am
I liked the techical stuff very much. Would like to read more of such stuff.
April 10th, 2006 at 8:16 am
I bet your grandmother has met my girlfriend, she works at the Mineola Wal-Mart.
April 10th, 2006 at 8:20 am
Thanks for the info. I’m a geek so you can imagine how pumped I was reading this. gaim is great!
April 10th, 2006 at 8:22 am
“Hail! hail!” to everyone directly (or indirectly) involved with meebo. Nice job!
April 10th, 2006 at 8:26 am
Hey !
Thanks for the explanation !.. Very interesting,
Excellent product !!! its been really good to use !
Keep it up !
April 10th, 2006 at 8:28 am
hey whats up :O but i have to go i was going to write somthing but i dont remmember so i will be back
April 10th, 2006 at 9:29 am
Hey I love your posts on the opening page. This last was great and satisfies what little “techie” resides in me. You guys are doing a great job and deserve a lot of credit for streamlining the whole IM process. I hope some day you will be able to offer all the features that the individual provides do. In the mean time your off to a great start.
Corak Deo, Gordon
April 10th, 2006 at 9:51 am
Very interesting. I thought you were using some kind of special jabber-server with transports to the other IM services. Good to see you’re using gaim though, it’s a good illustration of the advantages open source can bring.
April 10th, 2006 at 9:58 am
Very cool summary of the inner workings of Meebo. As a long time GAIM user, its great to see you guys pushing the envelope. I’ve recently “retired” my GAIM “fat client” in favor of meebo. keep up the great work!
–brian
April 10th, 2006 at 11:21 am
I can use any IM client and have pretty much tried them all. I’ve yet to find a better solution to the standard crop of bloated, ad-injected IM clients than Meebo.
Bells and whistles are great for some but all I want to do is right here, sleek, slim and ready to work. The only thing I ever missed was an audible tap on the shoulder and even that little issue was resolved with a subtle sound that doesn’t cause me to sling my headset across the room in agony.
Pleased? I could not be happier. I can no longer count how many friends and family members I have sent to Meebo over the past six months.
Well done, Meebo people. Well done, indeed!
April 10th, 2006 at 11:43 am
small world…i live in longview, tx….”a stone’s throw” from your grandparents’ hometown!!!
-meebo fan in east tx
April 10th, 2006 at 12:04 pm
Cool to hear how meebo works, and I plan on using it well into the future.
But being wary since the last .com bust took away some of the best sites on the internet, How do you guys plan on making money with this? Offices, colocation facilitys, salaries, cant come for free.
Will meebo become a subscription app? Will you roll out a meebo lite and a full meebo like trillian did? Adsupported? Heh, poll google adwords in realtime based on the subject matter of your conversation at the moment. (Ads 2.0 I guess)
April 10th, 2006 at 12:12 pm
Wow, really interesting explanation. All those words like Ajax make me tingly inside. And, on a side note, it’s great to see a woman active in engineering, especially on such a cool program like Meebo.
April 10th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Nice story and good explaination about the router. It’s always intresting to know about the older generation attempting to learn about the new technology. I cant wait for the next blog about www456. Never know the purpose of it.
April 10th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Hi,
Great Job done by meebo.
Thank you for providing the techincal stuff.
I really liked it
Goodbye
April 10th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
you are a goofball that was the stupidest thing i ever ead in my life and i’m not young either
April 10th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
Hi Elaine,
The thing I like the most about Meebo is how transparent the company communication is with the outside world. How many companies are willing to disclose their back end tech to the world? Great company, great team & great culture!
Oh, the writeup was very good as well.
April 10th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
hi elaine and everybody,
i love reading your blog. very very interesting stuff! i think your parents are so cute!
April 10th, 2006 at 2:59 pm
hey!
I love this meebo thing, i get on it at school all the time!
its much better than AIM express and you can get on many IM programs at a time
that was a good post, to help with the non technilogical people–which im sure there are MANY out there.
April 10th, 2006 at 4:38 pm
Can you institute a buzz feature for the IM to let someone know you are trying to reach them.
April 10th, 2006 at 6:10 pm
Very well written blog, thanks for the explanation. Its really kind of you to explain. Keep up the awesome work and thanks for Meebo – it rocks.
April 10th, 2006 at 6:16 pm
Truly appreciate you guys tremendous effort to make this meebo possible! I’m just so amazed by meebo and how it doesn’t have seconds delay when a message has been sent to fellows on my MSn list unlike web-based MSN which sux…^_^ Good job and keep it up!
April 10th, 2006 at 6:29 pm
Well I am an IT guy, and i wudn’t really hesitate to rate this service as the best! no doubt that web based yahoo and msn messengers have more functionality but its not worth it ’cause they r terribly slow! a person MOSTLY uses a web based messenger for messaging…’cause for graphical communication there’s home rite?
For a person like me who really doesn’t want to hog his memory resources with memory resident messengers, Meebo Rules!
An excellent Endeavor!
Jude.
April 10th, 2006 at 7:16 pm
hello there ^__^ great topic for discussing how meebo works with only a few technicalities… By the way, is it possible to display the blog entry in the meebo window in real-time (similar on how the chat messages appear interactively)? I’m not sure if i’m just experiencing a special case here, but I only see the new entries in my meebo window a day after it was posted (Yesterday, my meebo window displayed the “rolodex of pizza” entry, but if I didn’t click further on the comments blog, I will not be able to know that this entry “nuts and bolts” is already available)… Thanks for the service!
April 10th, 2006 at 7:24 pm
A really great read! Thanks for explaining to us how all that works. I’m an IT major at college, so I was really interested in reading about how your system works. I think it’s great that you all are using GAIM as your backend, and that you’re able to interface it with the web. Keep up the good work!
April 10th, 2006 at 7:32 pm
i am extremely impressed with meebo, and with that explanation, you have endeared yourselves to the non-techies….
may meebo live long and free…
April 10th, 2006 at 7:56 pm
Fabulous work guys!!
Now,I love goin to my office….!!!!
Thanks again.
April 10th, 2006 at 8:22 pm
I digg it: http://digg.com/technology/How_Meebo_Works
April 10th, 2006 at 8:26 pm
Thanks so much for taking the time to explain such a complex thing in simple language! Appreciate that so much! I’m constantly trying to translate for my dad the advice that my network admin brother gives him… Had to laugh out loud when I read your post. Your parents are my parents almost exactly.
Thanks to all you guys for what you’re doing at meebo. Through meebo, I’ve found out that friends are finding/breaking up with boyfriends/girlfriends, getting married, having babies, deathly ill, changing jobs, moving away, angry at me, happy with me, etc etc etc. Just got tax advice this week using meebo.
If you only knew what all goes on through your service…
Thanks, guys.
April 10th, 2006 at 8:28 pm
elaine please married with me a love you
pleace
david
April 10th, 2006 at 9:12 pm
Nice writeup…. Ajax community will certainly love it…
April 10th, 2006 at 9:55 pm
Thanks for nice BLOG. I would like to see more from you ELAINE.
April 10th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
i was thinking that if you saw www9, that meant you were then 9th person currently using meebo.com to chat. but then i thought that wasn’t right.. you must have more people on than that.
April 10th, 2006 at 10:52 pm
Nice blog (I usually dont read many but this one I did
) Just one thought – maybe its only my problem, but when Im chatting with my friends via meebo, I often have to wait not 3-4 seconds for an answer to them but 3-4 and even more minutes… 
This happens especially when me an my friends are both chatting via meebo. Any idea why this happens?
April 10th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
Great blog !!!….plz write more about the technical aspects of Meebo n also abt why we see www27 etc in the URL
April 10th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
Hi Elaine,
It was a wonderful write up. I have never read blogs before, this is the first time i have read a blog and now i know how useful it is.
I wouldn’t have understood all the technical jargons if i had read anyother book. The time spent was worth it.
Thanks for such a nice blog.
Vijay
April 11th, 2006 at 12:03 am
Keep on using the different “www” syntaxes, somehow our administrators could not manage dansguardian to block meebo!
MEEBO RULZ!
April 11th, 2006 at 12:13 am
thanks a lot for that entry, i REALLY find it useful to learn more about computers and how things work
keep up the good work *thumbs up*
April 11th, 2006 at 1:22 am
very neat explanation!!! really appreciated!!! keep up the good work !
April 11th, 2006 at 1:25 am
Duh,its so cool.Have always been wondering how meebo works.Infact am in to tech,though i don’t know much,so i want know as much as i can and since am a student pursuing a degree in ICT,this has been a value added ti my knowledge.
April 11th, 2006 at 2:21 am
I love meebo and amazed with it. Thanks for sharing this particular post. I’m an internet nut but don’t know the ropes behind it. Reading through this post gave me an overview how internet connectivity works and I am impressed on how natural and easy flowing you sound explaining it. Keep up the good job and you have made chatting a lot easier to a lot of people
April 11th, 2006 at 2:30 am
That was a mind-blowing post. Looking forward to more such posts. I never knew that so much of technical information could be conveyed in such a simple yet effective style. Good Work! And, I love Meebo!
April 11th, 2006 at 3:54 am
hi!
Good story!
I’m from Estonia and I’m using Meebo because our IT-guy blocked all the other msn and messenger sites and programs (Dont ask why). So thanks for meebo! All my comunication goes thru this site.
I hope that the IT-guy doesn’t find out about meebo…
Keep up the good work!:)
April 11th, 2006 at 4:19 am
Olá.
Legal a história de cada um. Eu uso o memboo porque aqui na empresa onde trabalho, o msn é bloqueado. Este programa realmente ajuda muito agente a não ficar sem se comunicar.
Um abraço a todos.
I Live in São Paulo – Brasil
April 11th, 2006 at 4:33 am
Hey Elaine!
How good our lives will be, if we could also check all our different email accounts using meebo (without that shitty POP3).
Think about it.
April 11th, 2006 at 4:50 am
Great work buddy!
Being a IT Guy i never myself knew that so much u have put in…
But still onething I don understand whats the prefix in the URL and also the items being downloaded at the status bar in the explorer!?
April 11th, 2006 at 4:52 am
Great work buddy!
Being an IT Guy i never myself knew that so much u have put in…
But still onething I don understand whats the prefix in the URL and also the items being downloaded at the status bar in the explorer!?
April 11th, 2006 at 5:30 am
meebo, why du u call it meebo?..
April 11th, 2006 at 5:57 am
I was very happy reading this because i got to know how this really works….that was really interesting.im so happy for u guys that the traffic is increasing and many languages have also come up…
I had another doubt about that www3 or www4.y does that thing come up?
wud be happy if u cud explain that?
gud going guys…………….:-)
April 11th, 2006 at 7:10 am
Hey Elaine..nice blog,pretty informative,especially for someone who knows very little webpage programming but is very much interested….
And I gotta say,Meebo is a wonderful project…and I cant imagine how much work must have gone into this..but the output is excellent.
April 11th, 2006 at 7:15 am
hey i didnt like your story at all you write like a stupid slut
April 11th, 2006 at 7:48 am
Thanks Elaine for the great info! Also, please let the whole group know that i appreciate what ya’ll are doing. My company cut off direct access to AOL, yet everyone uses it daily to communicate between all us engineers. So once a gain the company is real smart about manpower and resources. haha Anyway, I’ve been able to keep up with work via your services as well as several of my coworkers. Your site is helping us do our jobs and be productive. Sorry our company doesn’t pay you for this …. then again they don’t pay us much for it either. lol
On another note … i have pictures of the dogwoods blooming out in Mineola. I was out there about two weeks ago as things were coming into bloom. So if you would like for me to forward you pics of Home Sweet Home, email me and I’ll drop you pics of the beautiful East Texas bloom.
Keep up the great work!!
April 11th, 2006 at 8:08 am
lol
April 11th, 2006 at 8:30 am
Thanks Elaine,
Its really wonderfull. Hats of for sharing knowledge.
April 11th, 2006 at 8:41 am
hola
April 11th, 2006 at 9:39 am
At least you guys aren’t posting the “secret sauce” like who your transit providers are, how much you’re paying per mb, how much bandwidth Meebo uses on a monthly basis, how many amps of power you’re using in your cabinets and whether you’re using AC or DC power. That’s what an ops person in theory might care about.
I’m sure that Meebo has it’s own load balancers, whether something they purchased like a CSM, BigIP or something free like LVS or you’ve created yourself.
When I see the www5.meebo.com, etc., I think of round robin DNS.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/Round_Robin_DNS.html
April 11th, 2006 at 9:49 am
whatever mates
April 11th, 2006 at 10:17 am
Hi, I’m new and i need some people to add on my buddy list. so if any body wants to add me my name is aimee_and_chris
——————-
Well g2g for now bye peeps
April 11th, 2006 at 10:27 am
Durango, huh? Small world. My parents both grew up there. Most of my summer months growing up were spent watching the night sky there, too. I’ve been to many places, but few are as scenic as Durango.
April 11th, 2006 at 10:42 am
Neat-o!…i love computers!!……well…i already knew what you typed…but yah…so bye i guess
April 11th, 2006 at 11:35 am
Hey,
It was a reely interestin rite up. The examples for the colocation unit were so imaginable. Explanation was gud too. Hoping to see more posts frm u Elaine. Keep it up. Peace!
-> Ali
April 11th, 2006 at 12:22 pm
Sweet write-up! Never posted a comment before, but this post prompted an immediate and hearty “well done”. Keep it up!
-Ben
April 11th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
you must’ve been an English minor/major, too… very very well written. Color me educated…= )
April 11th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
question – “server keeps the connection open ” is there a security concern if the connection is constantly open? Thanks
April 11th, 2006 at 2:13 pm
All hail Stanford grads & Stanford startups!
April 11th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
i found your entry useless
April 11th, 2006 at 4:25 pm
I love your write up! I don’t know why but it makes me laugh…
April 11th, 2006 at 4:27 pm
I think your entry is really good and I absoulutley adore meebo for chatting. I like it better than a lot of other chatting sites, it is #1 for my chatting but what would be cool if you’d add a sound to meebo, so you would kno when you had an imcoming message.
April 11th, 2006 at 6:38 pm
I love your product and when I’m not remoted into my machine, I use Meebo and tell people about it all the time.
Not to be a stickler, but I just thought it was a little wierd to just spawn up instances of GAIM to do your dirty work in talking to the external services.
I’d have thought that smart engineers like yourself would have built a scalable extensible messaging architecture on your own.
Kudos for copping some good tech from the open source world. Great use guys.
Rahul
April 11th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
That is really helpful. I can envision all the cables running under oceans and whatnots..hehe..but it all does make sense. I’ve been using meebo for about a month especially at work where I prefer not to download all the IM programs and this is the nicest looking one out there and it works really well too. Nice job everyone!
April 11th, 2006 at 7:09 pm
[...] Elaine’s latest entry on meebo’s blog, which is called meeblog is really helpful in helping me understand what happens when someone logs into meebo in layman’s terms. Eventhough I have a website, I’m not really into the hardware and technical side of things. I learn stuff through a lot of trial and error. Heh. [...]
April 11th, 2006 at 7:16 pm
i finally get it! awesome explanation! you should teach grade 9 tech class or something!
April 11th, 2006 at 8:51 pm
So now i’m not only using the meebo and asking my friends to use meebo.. but i can act like a meebo professor who can explain inside out of meebo..
especially bout the ajax, comet, GAIM, XMLHttpRequest, etc..
thanx dude..!
April 11th, 2006 at 8:56 pm
Hi this is the first comment I’ve ever made on a blog, but I just had to tell you guys how much I like meebo & especially this blog entry!
Keep up the good work! I too would be interested in knowing about the www25, etc.
Also I’m curious what you guys drink for energy & focus, coffee like the other 3/4 of the world, or Spark like me, or something else?
Thanks!
P.S. You can find more info on Spark here:
http://www.advocare.com/04091068/Store/ItemDetail.aspx?itemCode=A4094&id=A
April 11th, 2006 at 10:37 pm
Simply Superb explanation, even a computer duffer like me could understand that how meebo works.
April 11th, 2006 at 10:57 pm
yea get sandy to tell us why it is www4 i have been wondering why its like that
April 12th, 2006 at 2:46 am
this has been interesting to read
April 12th, 2006 at 3:59 am
wow… i got lot of interesting stuff. waiting to know abt www2,www3,etc., Good Work Guys…
April 12th, 2006 at 4:07 am
Hi this is just wonderful want to know if some of the features available in AIM (standalone) can be incorporated into AIM facilityin meebo like the voice chat sort of thing and changing the background screen
April 12th, 2006 at 4:33 am
Hey !
Thanks for the explanation !.. Very interesting,
Excellent product !!! its been really good to use !
Keep it up !
April 12th, 2006 at 4:35 am
hey
i like the product
thx for the explanation
keep up the good work
April 12th, 2006 at 6:10 am
Hah, Grandparents live in mineola? I live in Tyler. Wierd
Love the meebo!
April 12th, 2006 at 7:29 am
>There are long underground cables owned by companies
>like AT&T and Verizon that connect the East and West
>Coast and run underneath the oceans to connect continents.
Hmm, cables connecting the East and West Coast. I guess those of us in the middle of the country are out of luck.
April 12th, 2006 at 9:00 am
amazing site ! i use it all the time at work and school. thanks
April 12th, 2006 at 9:49 am
Great write-up. My boyfriend introduced meebo to me about 6 months ago, i always wonder how it was done. Thank you. Oh by the way, great service.
April 12th, 2006 at 10:19 am
YEA IT WAS INTERESTING, I ENJOYED READING IT…..
April 12th, 2006 at 10:52 am
great work…. keep going.
April 12th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
Hey,
Great write-up. Thxx for the all the info and keep up
the fabulous job that u guys r doin.
Cheers !!
April 12th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
That was a fun read because I’m sitting in engineering class right now… bored. haha
April 12th, 2006 at 4:44 pm
I would appreciate a preference setting to toggle off the blog entry window within Meebo.
April 12th, 2006 at 4:55 pm
goodcool
April 12th, 2006 at 7:50 pm
wow, thats pretty amazing stuff. where do all you people find the time for these kinds of thingzz?? o_O
April 12th, 2006 at 8:16 pm
Well, i’m not too sure about “Websense”, but generally what I use to sidestep various hinderance are virtual browsers… Here is one that I have had good experience with… http://www.webwarper.net
Love the info on how Meebo works too =), oddly inspiring in a sense.
April 12th, 2006 at 11:06 pm
Loved your description on how meebo works! Thank you for sharing!
April 13th, 2006 at 1:35 am
Omg! Thanx gosh for meebo! My parents blocked out all chat rooms and meebo was the onlii place where i could still access msn!
April 13th, 2006 at 2:11 am
hi! i just want to say your introduction msg is very very enchanting! and thanks for meebo too! i love how you write abt colo and all those undersea cable stuff. great work and thanks for meebo~~~
April 14th, 2006 at 10:51 am
[...] meebo is a multi-protocol, browser-based chat client. They also have an impressively well-written blog. [...]
April 18th, 2006 at 4:02 am
Kudos! man . really rare explanation of the architecture of one own’s website.
Very informative , i learned a lot from this.
April 18th, 2006 at 11:10 am
Awesome!…………..Meebo Rox……….guys, just keep working on more features like, allowing meebo to accept yahoo conf. notifications etc.
April 24th, 2006 at 5:27 am
thank you for putting your knowledge simply and elegently
April 28th, 2006 at 8:16 am
How does the company make money?
May 1st, 2006 at 7:24 am
Hi Elaine,
The post was very informative and written in non-technical language, was very easy to understand. It re-furbished my basic understanding on how Internet, Servers work and how do they talk.
Keep up your posting on such good articles.
June 19th, 2006 at 12:07 am
I’m curious about the Comet part, I’m trying to learn Comet and I’m kinda cloudy on the server side. How do you guys implement the long-lived connection, do you guys use something like LightStreamer to do that, do you even need that layer on the server side? Great entry by the way I enjoyed reading the inner workings of Meebo. Thanks.
October 24th, 2006 at 9:04 pm
Hello
Thanks for the such a nice information. But still I am wodering how meebo connect to different IMs and fetch their buddy list ?
Regards,
Sid
October 24th, 2006 at 9:48 pm
Woowww that’s just amazingly smart! I’ve been thinking about how meebo works and how to do a quite dissimilar project on my own but that faces some similar issues, and the moment you said GAIM i just fell off my chair… brilliant!!!
October 29th, 2006 at 5:20 am
Such outta box ideas will and have always ruled the world .
Great Going! all the best with future ventures . Do inform us about those ventures too .
regards
December 18th, 2006 at 7:51 am
gracias por todo Meebo ya que esta muy bueno y rapido, es increible ¡
felicidades
December 28th, 2006 at 6:42 am
oi sandy , por favor me adicione no seu meebo . alan_bik@hotmail.com , ou me ligue 08006542035 , obrigado bjos Alan …..
March 7th, 2007 at 4:51 am
First of all,I would like to congratulate u on witting & explaining the fact that has been
confusing me for long….
I’m a student of S’ware Engg from INDIA & ur
meebo.com’s concept really ignited inside me somthing, what i don’t know but it did….
Thanks for such a great explanation…
Keep The Good Work…
Long Live Meebo
March 31st, 2007 at 12:00 am
http://www.google.com/71
April 14th, 2007 at 12:34 am
hey nice post. thanks for sharing the information and avoiding the jargons
April 23rd, 2007 at 3:07 pm
cars inside
cars inside
July 3rd, 2007 at 9:46 am
Hey Elaine!, i must tell you, this article made for very interesting reading. i’ve been using meebo for quite a while, and as a CS student i’ve always been quite curious as to how it actually worked!
One quick question i’d like to ask you though (and i’d really appreciate it if you could reply by email); I’m currently playing around with the new windows vista sidebar gadgets, and i was wondering if there’s any way for me to create a meebo gadget using just html and javascript? i’m more or less referring to just the communication framework – the general look and feel is something i’d look into myself. If it is indeed possible, can you give me some guidelines as to where i’d begin??
and one final random question
I’m currently looking at Pidgeon (formerly gaim).. and was wondering on what your thoughts are regarding porting the source code to C#.
Thanks a million.. and keep up the good work, its amazing.
July 15th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
hey its very nice one.I like it very much. But I want some infomation about internal working about meebo (i.e which protocal is used and how it is used …how meebo connect to other IM’s …??? ) So that, i will get the complete understanding of meebo. Waiting for ur reply. Send me ur reply on my mail id.
August 7th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
bdek lsdoif sdlfie
September 22nd, 2007 at 2:48 am
Its very interesting. Thanks for sharing ideas.
January 9th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
[...] Nuts and Bolts: http://blog.meebo.com/?p=126 [...]
March 17th, 2008 at 3:21 am
Hi Elaine,
First of all , I love meebo very much!
That was a nice write up.
But I think you had hidden away some of the trade secrets that really forms meebo’s core functionality.
I did a guess of how you might be doing it. So check out my post on my blog
http://www.techmytongue.blogspot.com/
Thanks,
Venkat from India
June 6th, 2008 at 5:04 am
Is meebo safe??
June 10th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
Stephen…
….
What you are planning to do will make meebo obsolete
So don’t expect an answer.
July 18th, 2009 at 10:16 am
I am new to the forum