Yeah, I've been pretty obsessed IM widgit/client compatibility for the last week...

I posted yesterday about monitoring your MeeboMe widgits in an IM client, and after playing with this functionality in both Adium and Pidgin, I now understand just how powerful that MeeboMe plugin for Pidgin is.

When connected to MeeboMe via XMPP/Jabber in Adium, I receive an authorization request every single time someone navigates to the web page containing a widgit. Until I authorize a visitor, she sees my status displayed as "offline" and can't IM me. Apart from being an incredible nuisance, particularly on high traffic pages, often times in Adium many of those authorization requests are buried beneath other windows, and I never know that they are there. Thus, my visitors see me as offline. Fortunately, in Adium I can change the event settings so that I hear a sound, get a Growl notification, see a bouncing dock icon, etc., but I still have to manually authorize each and every visitor.

The Pidgin plugin? It automatically authorizes every single visitor, effectively eliminating the request windows and the need for manual authorization. (Fortunately, it appears that a Summer of Code project will address this issue in the next version of Adium.)

Another hassle in Adium is that once I authorize a visitor, she is added to my buddy list (even if I uncheck the box to add them as a contact). That's fine as long as she's still viewing the page with the widgit, but unlike the Meebo web client, that visitor remains in my buddy list long after she's actually left the page. To get rid of her, I have to manually remove her from the list. Again, for a widgit on a high traffic page, that's a lot of manual buddy removals.

Worse still, I have a site with an IM widgit on every single page for certain types of users. This means that every time a single visitor navigates to a new page I am hit with new authorizations and new buddies in my list. That makes for a lot of manual maintenance.

The Pidgin plugin? It automatically removes each visitor from my buddy list as soon as she leaves the page containing the widgit. (There's no indication if this will be addressed in new versions of Adium.)

For Windows users, Pidgin handles MeeboMe monitoring beautifully and seamlessly. For Mac users, however, there doesn't appear to be a good solution yet, at least not until the next version of Adium. (A forum thread on the Meebo website confirms that authorization requests also have to be handled manually in the other two major Mac IM clients, iChat and Proteus; without a plugin, this will be the reality for all XMPP/Jabber IM clients, including Trillian Pro.) For this reason, I'll be sticking with Plugoo for my widgit needs. Besides, Plugoo is still the only game in town for another feature I find essential for virtual reference service -- the ability to send offline messages as emails, not simply as a cached instant message.