eBuddy logo (Source: eBuddy)
May be a bit late to the party, but I finally have a smart phone and unlimited data plan... but what can I do with it?
After finally being forced by my employer to carry around a
Research in Motion BlackBerry with an unlimited data plan, I naturally started
to use it for every day work-related tasks that I need to complete. But
since I am allowed to use the phone for personal use, I decided to try and find
some type of online chat messenger so I could communicate with friends on my
buddy lists.
After attending a tech show recently, I remember stumbling upon a colleague who
mentioned she had been using the eBuddy messenger for phones.
EBuddy
is available either as a download that must be installed on the phone, or an
online version through your phone's Web browser. EBuddy users are able to
integrate their AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), MSN, Yahoo and Google Talk buddy
lists into one simple chat screen. It's also possible to use the MySpace
Messenger service through eBuddy, if you want to do that.
The major downside last year was that eBuddy, unfortunately, did not make it
possible to log into multiple IM clients at the same time. This proved to
be especially annoying when using the browser version of the service, as it's
already annoying to have multiple chat windows open simultaneously.
That's why the company released eBuddy Lite Messenger, which is able to support
multiple chat sessions from different browsers simultaneously.
The web browser edition of eBuddy hosts more than 80 million chat sessions each
month, with users logging 38 minutes per chat session. Not surprisingly,
70 percent of eBuddy's users are between the ages of 16 and 24 years of age,
with at least 1 billion impressions per month.
The online service has a rather cluttered screen that has a few too many ads,
but I guess they have to generate revenue somehow!
The eBuddy Lite Messenger is available on mobile phones and the Sony
PlayStation Portable, or any other device able to support xHTML/WML. It
also has been optimized for both low bandwidth and high bandwidth phone
networks.
I haven't had any major problems using both the web browser version and the
installed version of eBuddy. It's nice to be able to chat with your
friends on different chat networks using a single program.
Even though it's a bit too cluttered for my tastes, it's still a free service
that is easy to use and has just enough functionality to keep me using it in
the future. I'm curious to hear what some of you think about the service;
what do you like and not like about it?
"If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations have occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel." -- AMD CEO Hector Ruiz in 2007
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