Slashdot humor:

“From the Download.com article: “It slows down your browsing. It makes some Web sites inaccessible for no discernible reason. It doesn’t even offer you any xiao long bao or pu’er tea for your troubles. But if you want to know what life behind the Great Firewall of China is like, then the Firefox plug-in China Channel is the cheapest and fastest way to experience using the Internet in China without actually being there.”

Okay, so it’s some plugin that uses a China IP proxy on download.com, humorous, but I recall you could get around it with *shudders* AOL five years ago…

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AOL, owner of AIM and later ICQ, has entered into a partnership with Meebo as a part of AOL’s Open AIM 2.0, a complete reversal as noted via TechCrunch:

What that means is that AOL goes from being in a position of half ignoring services like Meebo and half vaguely threatening to sue them, to fully embracing and supporting the services.

The downside? The likelihood that AIM ads will have to be shown for clients that partner up with AOL, one of the main reasons people left AIM in the first place (secondary being using a service that allows people to just use one client to chat with friends across all platforms).

I recall the downgrades with AIM as it slowly began to literally kill instant messaging with the use of video ads that played automatically or whenever you accidentally rolled your mouse over them. It literally forced me from constantly messaging my friends just because they were online, to hiding the chat client and waiting for my friends to chat with me because I so hated the annoying ads that were showing up by AIM.

And then AIM decided to downgrade its program by taking out free services within AIM Triton, and as I met friends in China who solely used MSN Messenger, I felt it was time to use Trillian as a great way to put all the programs into one single client that did not eat up memory for other programs (games usually).

So, I feel for many of the users of Meebo as any ads popping up or displaying without me being able to customize how the layout is by a user generated community for free is only going to send me elsewhere for another program that does that (and thus why I went with Trillian).

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