Meetro became popular after the rumors spread claiming that Google was planning to acquire the company. However, with the arrival of Google Talk, it is now clear that this innovative firm is not going to be acquired in the distant future and they plan to do something which none of the current messengers have done in all these years. Meetro is an Instant Messenger, which shows the proximity in miles how far away each user is from your location.
The aim is to help people find other people in their locality. We could not actually find people living near us considering not many Indians are online on Meetro at any given time. But with time, we hope the application would become popular and more widespread bring in more and more users. We at TechWhack have been constantly using Meetro since it was launched and have our share of fun using it.
The most interesting part is that the developers and the head of the company are all available on Meetro itself. And they actually talk and discuss stuff with you. This is quite unlike the irritating Yahoo! Messenger helper, which is an automated reply system. You can get help, tips, and all the other information about the company. There is no arrogance, no fear from the competition (Google is now one) and they just want to do something big and make Meetro happen for the general public.
The company just released a minor update to the program, which fixed some of the glitches in the earlier version and added support for MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger protocol. This gets it near to that Instant Messenger which can help people stop using multiple applications for separate protocols. In addition, they get access to the ever-improving Meetro letting them find people in their own surrounding.
The application is also now being ported to the gaming platforms Nintendo DS and Sony Playstation Portable. The aim is to get the gamers find out gamers around them while they are on the move! CEO Paul Bragiel spoke about this concept: We see the DS and PSP as platforms that were designed to be used for applications besides games. We want to bring social software to these machines. This would take sometime to arrive in the market.
However, the next step for the company is to release a version for the Mac, which should be out soon. A Linux version is also planned and is expected to be out by January 2006 as per company sources.
