Last week, I posted about Plugoo and its ability to send IMs from your website directly to your IM client. For me, this made Plugoo preferable to MeeboMe and its requirement that you monitor messages from within the Meebo website.

Well, Chad Boeninger has a detailed post over at Library Voice outlining how to use the IM client Pidgin (once known as GAIM) to monitor MeeboMe widgits. It requires you to install a plugin for Pidgin and fiddle with the settings, but the overall work to get it up and running appears minimal. Better yet, according to one commenter, this little trick is workable with any IM client that supports XMPP.

So I did a little digging. And it turns out MeeboMe DOES work with any XMPP compatible client. (If you have no idea whether your client supports XMPP, check to see if you can add an a Jabber account. You can? The you're probably good to go.) So as of an hour ago I'm monitoring all of my MeeboMe widgits with Adium, the IM client I already use anyway. Trillian should also work, but you'll have to buy the Pro version to make this work. (I haven't tested this on Trillian Pro yet, so don't take my word for it.) This isn't quite the same as Plugoo, which actually forwards messages to your AIM, MSN, Yahoo or Google Talk screenname, but it certainly closes the functionality gap considerably.

[Library Voice] MeeboMe and Pidgin is like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (via The Distant Librarian)