Over at WisBlawg yesterday, Bonnie Shucha posted about Plugoo, a widget you can insert into your website to allow visitors to chat with you directly from the web page. For several months I've been using MeeboMe to accomplish this same feat in an internal clinic website I run. (Attendees of the CALI session I co-presented with UNLV's Megan Chaney back in May saw the MeeboMe widget in action on our site.) With Meebo, however, the only way to make myself available for chat sessions with visitors was to log in to the Meebo website and then constantly monitor that Firefox tab for new messages.

With Plugoo, however, these messages come directly to my AIM screenname, so it integrates completely with the IM client (Adium) I'm already using. Better still, since my AIM account forwards IMs to my cell phone when I'm not online, messages sent from the website also get forwarded to my cell phone. Granted, in many situations it's probably not advisable to use a screenname that forwards (particularly if you enjoy sleep), but it's still very cool to know that the option is available and works -- flawlessly.

Many librarians already know about Plugoo, and the debate between advocates of Plugoo and Meebo has been ongoing for awhile. Until now, however, the major drawback for Plugoo was its inability to handle multiple simultaneous chats. If one user was already chatting with you, other users would have to wait for that conversation to close before they could chat with you. For this reason, I stuck to Meebo.

As Bonnie points out in her post, however, that limitation is now gone. Plugoo now supports multiple chats. With this problem fixed, I saw no reason not to switch from Meebo to Plugoo.

One of my favorite features of Plugoo is the user's ability to detach the conversation from the webpage. By detaching the conversation, the user can navigate away from the web page on which it appears but still maintain the chat session with me. This was a major problem on the internal website. I even posted the Meebo widget on every page of the site, but as soon as the user loaded a new page, the previous chat session was gone, meaning access to previous messages in the conversation was completely lost.