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The most discussed subject here at MeGlobe is what features should we add next to make MeGlobe more useful and fun for our community? The first place we look to answers for is you! Our community. We've spoken to many of you, received your feedback and read your suggestions on our forums and it looks like many of you love using MeGlobe but still miss chatting with your buddies on your other IM accounts.

We'd hate to keep you from being able to chat with all of your buddies, so........here's what we've done:

You can now log into MeGlobe and be able to chat with your buddies on your AIM, MSN and Yahoo chat accounts! How? Simple, after you log in click on the "Add Account" button to add your other IM accounts.

We hope you enjoy!

French author, Jean Marie Gusatave Le Clezio has just been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. In case you’re wondering who he is I’ll give you a little background. Over the course of his career he’s written over 30 books focusing on themes that are interesting to the team here at MeGlobe such as language, travel and even two translations on Indian Mythology. Hopefully we can get him to come pay a visit to MeGlobe someday so we can have a French – English chat about some of the wonderful books he’s written!

I’m sure we can all agree that the internet and technology have made it easier for us to connect with each other. I’m wondering if we’re able to communicate, on a global scale, any more easily than we were over 10 years ago when ICQ and AIM chat first became wildly popular. After all, according to Internet World Stats, only 29.4% of the world online population is English speaking.

Sure, we’ve got a bunch of new tools to use like Twitter and FriendFeed, and social networks like MySpace and Facebook that help us get in touch and share things with each other. But is it any easier now than it was 10 years ago to ask someone in Paris what galleries are showing cutting edge, emerging art? Or to ask someone in Montreux, Switzerland where the best parties are during the Jazz festival and whether or not it’s a good idea to jump into the lake (I made that mistake once!)? Or even something as simple as discussing the latest World Cup Soccer results with someone who doesn’t speak your language.

I was very surprised to learn that as of June 2008, only roughly 1/5 of the world population uses the internet. I can only wonder what online community will be like when the internet becomes cheaper and more widely available and if the ways that people communicate with each other will change. I believe that language learning communities and translation based solutions like MeGlobe will continue to become increasingly relevant but I’m wondering if people will find new and interesting ways to communicate. I’d love to see everyone’s thoughts and insights, please feel free to leave your comments for me or send me an IM about it. Thanks!

-Jose

Good news! We’ve taken down our chat rooms for some fine tuning and improvements, we’d like to thank everyone for all of the valuable feedback we’ve received. As always, our priority is making sure you have the best experience possible. We’ll be hard at work taking your suggestions into account and implementing them into a new and we think much cooler version of the rooms sometime soon!

In the meantime, we’ve added in a couple of new features to our chat application:

1) Feedback Tool - Quick way to let us know what you think we should add in next
2) Help Tool - Gives you a hand with using MeGlobe if you need it.

One last thing, some of you have had problems logging into MeGlobe behind a firewall. We’ve been able squash this pesky bug so it should no longer be an issue! If you happen to come across anything else we need to take care of, please let us know by using our Forums or the new Feedback Tool.

Thanks!

MeGlobe Throws a Good Party from MeGlobe Viral on Vimeo.

MeGlobe Saves Pets from MeGlobe Viral on Vimeo.

Your initial feedback has been great, with one exception, I can sum it up with this quote "I really like meglobe and think its a great idea...but how do I make new friends to talk to?" Well you have spoken and we are listening. Tonight we are releasing our brand new Multilingual Chat Rooms!

On top of you guys needing an area to meet, we really wanted to do something for the Olympics and thought this was a perfect opportunity to theme the rooms while we give our users this preview release. Admittedly the rooms are far from perfect, (we like to embrace our inner beta) but they will give you guys a chance to see the progress we have made and get your feedback early and often.

Howto:
When you log in you will now see a room drawer attached to your buddylist, double click on one of the rooms and get chatting. You can tab to the other languages to see what your new friends are seeing and of course edit any translations that need a little help.

Possible topics for chatting:
- Why you shouldn't talk smack on US swimming
- Those synchronized Chinese Divers (they are insanely good)
- Figure out how the scoring works for boxing
- Think about ways to avoid BSOD for the closing ceremonies

So we did a lot of maintenance and optimization of a few things with release .8.5.4 which just came out about an hour ago. We don't like to break things so if you find something new/old broken please let us know....

We have a brand spankin new tutorial that goes over a bunch of our latest features and our updated interface. As our older (2 - 4 week =]) users can tell, we are changing the chat app constantly and really appreciate the feedback we are getting. As a future source of entertainment, we are going to keep our old tutorials up so that everyone can enjoy/make fun of our humble beginnings.

One of our users, Juarez P. A. Filho, did a nice write up about our chat app last week and even created a Portuguese tutorial. Truthfully, I have no idea what he is saying but it seems like he is being nice =). We really appreciate the help Juarez, obrigado!

MeGlobe Screencast from Juarez P. A. Filho on Vimeo.