Meeting Meebo

Being in the web development industry, I really ought to be more security conscious. I showed meebo to a friend a few months back. His first reaction after seeing the log-in page was ... "yeah right, like I'm just going to type in the passwords to all my IM accounts".

It occurred to me later that he probably thought that I was trying to "phish" his passwords.

Phishing is indeed one of the things that you need to look out for when surfing online but so are companies that are just plain "evil". These companies exist online to extract statistics, marketing trends and user information from people that sign up to their so called services.

Don't get me wrong, gathering information about your users is not evil. It's when they sell it or use the information without explicit permission, worse still if they sneak that little detail in the "terms of service" which no one bothers to read. When they do that, it's not just sneaky, it's plain evil.

Meebo doesn't seem to be that type of company.

I read their meeblog once in a while and I like how their blog articles are posted. It makes me wonder if all of them are excellent writers or whether an editor reads thru them first before they get posted. Either way, I find that the style of writing is informative yet casual, almost endearing at times :-) This is a recent example.

The about page is another one to like. These people don't hide themselves behind a brand name, a mission statement or a company logo. They put themselves out into the open and post pictures of themselves with clever captions. It's the people that make the company and not the other way around.