Over the past week, BuzzShout has been getting thousands of hits through Google a day from the search term “messengerfx.” I didn’t know of any big buzz about MessengerFX, and have scarcely heard the service being mentioned ever since it was submitted a while back. It turned out that many of the Google searches for MessengerFX were located in Europe, so I figured that perhaps I was the one missing out on all the buzz.

For curiosities sake, I decided to give it a test run. MessengerFX is an in-browser interface to MSN messenger, the same space that the well known Meebo is in. Personally, I don’t use MSN messenger; I’ve always used AIM. But even now, I don’t AIM that much, since I find that it reduces my productivity.

MessengerFX is pretty snappy, and does all the things that Meebo can do, except that it only supports MSN messenger. During my testing, it seemed to be stable, and provided enough features to use as a light IM client within a browser.

In the end, I don’t see any compelling features that would make Meebo fans switch. Meebo also supports AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Jabber, and GTalk. Meebo supports more languages as well. MessengerFX will need to support at least these other services to compete on the same level as Meebo.

This leaves the question: why am I getting so many hits from MessengerFX via Google? Are there a lot of fans of it that I’m not aware of? Did they break into a major news article in Europe? Anyone know?

This entry was posted by James Yu on Sunday, May 28th, 2006 at 8:54 pm and is filed under MessengerFX, Instant Messaging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.