I got a preview of the forthcoming web IM system Wablet yesterday. I posted about the first rumors about Wablet three weeks ago. It’s a Flash service that can access all your accounts on the major IM services or users can get a Wablet username. IM sessions can be embedded in blogs and social networks or they can appear in a popup box from any page. That’s nothing new, but Wablet lets you manage multiple chats simultaneously with people who see different public facing profiles describing you. This sort of service has the potential to be serious business, see the recent AOL acquisition of Userplane and the Sequoia Capital funding of Meebo. Wablet utilizes identity, reputation, permissions, queuing, and a very nice flash interface – it’s ambitious. The business model will be in small part contextual advertising but in large part based on the use of the service by small businesses as part of their CRM strategy. I feel safe saying that consumers interested in hard core feature-rich web IM are going to love Wablet. The company has offices in San Francisco and Manila. It’s lead by David Foote, Chairman and founder of Groovenet a social network site for the Philippines. Up to 500 test accounts will be opened over the next few weeks, Foote says, and you can submit your email address on the site now to request one. Here’s how it works. A Wablet chat box can be embedded or linked to as a pop-up. Visitors seeking to chat with you must request permission first and you can view the person’s profile and reputation built up via chats with other users of the system before accepting an IM. So far that’s the case only for users of Wablet’s IM service, but reputation tied to usernames of other major IM vendors may be available in the future (I hope so). User profiles are set up to include badges to profile pages across a long list of other systems, so when a person seeks to initiate a chat with you there are links available to their pages on Flickr or MySpace for example. When you have multiple people seeking to chat with you, their avatars appear in a que above the box you are currently in. Waiting chats show how long the person has been waiting for approval and chats underway show lines entered in a thought bubble above avatars → Read More
We’ve caught rumor of a new Meebo competitor in the web IM space called Wablet. Development is underway in both San Francisco and the Philippines. Reader Mike Abundo, a tech writer from the Philippines, claimed it was going to blow away Meebo in a comment responding to our coverage of the new Meebome offering last week. Aiming to create “a highly scalable next generation instant messaging and communications platform,” the company was hiring a senior web developer and Datacenter/Linux Administrator for their US location in May. A beta appeared late last month on a Filipino Flash developer’s site, but has since been taken down. I’m very curious to find out more about this mysterious company and I expect they’ll be making an appearance soon. They’ve got some steep competition with Meebo, eBuddy and KoolIM (links to our reviews) all making strong showings in the web IM space. That’s no reason to stop innovating, of course. If whispers about startups in stealth are your thing, check out this blog post by Mitch Kapor (co-founder of Lotus 1-2-3 in the 80′s, amongst other things) about a new startup he’s pushing towards beta. Based on the Foxmarks bookmarking plug-in for Firefox, the new company will be a search play based on aggregate data from social bookmarking – but with a strong privacy policy, a threshold of multiple users bookmarking something before it’s included in the search index and results that go beyond that single system’s users. Sounds like something that’s needed to happen for awhile. We found that one via Richard McManus. → Read More
