When I blogged about Mosoto a few months ago, I was a little wary of its offerings – mainly, having access to chat with friends’ friends. But now that Facebook Platform has launched and I’ve played with the plug-in (if you can call it that), I yearn for the very functions that caused me skepticism.
Mosoto, in its current state, is not working for me. Here’s why:
What I envisioned: An actual application displayed on my profile. I sign into my Mosoto chat (cutely tucked away to one side of my profile, and customized to perfection!), and then all of my friends and friends’ friends who are also logged on populate my Mosoto “buddy list”. Then I IM everyone on my list and waste tons of time.
What I got: Taken to Mosoto’s homepage, where a chat box appeared with 0 friends available for IM and some bizarro chat room with people I didn't know in it jabbering about weird files to share. Looks like my friends have to install the Mosoto application to chat, which they won’t if they’re pulled away from their Facebook profile. Wackness in a bottle.
Though the Meebo application is different in that you sign in to existing messaging accounts (MSN, AIM, Google, etc – a fact that, for Facebook purposes, makes the Meebo plug-in NOT AS COOL as the completely original friend-to-friend messaging opportunity that Mosoto could offer), Meebo does appear seamlessly on your Facebook profile. And that's good. That works. That's the hot shit.
Because people want things for their profile. They don’t want to be yanked away to some far away land.
Can my vision be realized? Are you working on it? Please say you are, Mosoto, because I don’t think I’m alone on this. And I think it could be great.
Hi Ryan,
Paul from Mosoto here. I understand you have a lot of questions and suggestions about Mosoto, what we're doing and where we are going. Shoot me an email, and we'll chat. =)
Regards,
Paul
paul [at] mosoto [dot] com
Posted by: Paul Chung | May 30, 2007 at 03:28 AM
Got a nice long email from Paul at Mosoto and then we had a lovely little chat (on Mosoto, of course!). Looks like they've got similar criticism from others and know that being taken away from Facebook to interact with Facebook contacts doesn't really work. Go the sense that some fixes are in the works ;)
Posted by: RyanB | May 31, 2007 at 11:35 AM