In this video, we’re going to take a look at another useful social media tool that you can embed to your WordPress blog called Meebo. And you can find this at Meebo.com. So Meebo is basically a service that allows you to combine your instant messaging services and also your social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, etc. into one centralized user interface. Now, although you can explore the actual purpose of Meebo itself, in this video, we’re just gonna focus on what is called the Meebo Bar.
[evp width=”640″ height=”480″]tutorials/wpvideos/meebo-intro.swf[/evp]
So I’m gonna show you how this bar works. Now, this is an example of a blog using the Meebo Bar. So if you look at the bottom of the screen here, this is how the bar looks like. And it enables any of your blog visitors to instantly share your website content to the popular social media services like Facebook, Twitter, etc., and in fact, you can directly post a Like in Facebook; you can also post Digg, and you can also Stumble it here. So I’m gonna click on Share Page; I’m gonna show you what happens. So instantly, the entire screen is blanked out right now –transparent black color over the entire content of your blog…and you can see all these icons here: Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Yahoo! and also to email directly. Okay?
So on your right, you would see some of the chat options. So if you’re currently using Google Talk, Facebook chat, AIM, or MySpace IM, then you can also share this blog’s content directly to your instant messenger. So what happens when someone, for example, clicks on Twitter? It will open up a new window directly to your Twitter account, and you can see the blog name here, and the actual URL of the blog automatically shortened using the default URL shortening service.
Now with the Meebo Bar installed on your site, however, users will also be able to share images. For example, take the image of WordPress here, if I put my mouse over it, and now you can see an icon here that says ‘drag to share’. See, if I just drag this a little bit, and you see the same window pop up again, but I can share this image to Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Yahoo! etc. So let me just put it to Google Buzz, and let’s see what happens.
Okay, so you can see it opens up a new window directly to Google Buzz, and you can see the blog post itself over here, alright? And…oh, some of the links here, and also the image that you shared earlier. And in the next video, I’m going to show you how to actually install the Meebo Bar to your WordPress in the form of a WordPress plugin, and how to add additional services – for example, Digg, Stumble Upon, etc. to your Meebo Bar.