Meetro beta review: Meetro beta

How can you bridge the gap between the virtual world and the brick-and-mortar one? That's what the makers of the Meetro instant-messaging service hope to address. Sure, the Web connects us with people around the world, but hunkering over a keyboard is counterproductive if you're trying to meet people in the same room. Trying to help introduce strangers and to notify you when your buddies are around the corner, the Meetro beta IM tool detects and displays the locations of its users. It also lets you import contacts from its leading IM rivals, such as Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger with Voice, AIM, and ICQ.

Installing Meetro beta took us a couple of quick minutes in our Windows XP tests. We were grateful that the process didn't try to overwrite our browser settings by default or install extra unasked-for software, as is common with most messenger apps, including those from Windows Live, Yahoo, and AOL.

The Meetro beta displays the locations and pictures of strangers and lets you import contacts from the major IM apps so that you can chat with familiar people, too

Meetro beta's very blue interface is uncomplicated, which is good. Metro is not yet a final product, but during our testing, it included a bunch of emoticons but no avatars, no links to other online toys, and no flashy ads. The Near and Friends tabs display the icons of other users. You can click on the bottom icons representing other IM brands to add your IM pals from MSN or Windows Live, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, and ICQ. We did so in a few minutes from our Windows XP PC. If you use Mac OSX, however, you won't be able to chat with users of other IM brands. Unfortunately, contacts imported from these third-party accounts don't include location data. Meetro beta also lets you import profile details from your MySpace account. This worked fine for our About, Movies, and Tagline text fields, but not for Books. And while MySpace offers its own messaging system, we wish that Meetro beta could import our MySpace contacts.

You can hover over a user's photo to view their age, location, and personal statement. Meetro can tell where you are by detecting the location of wireless access points in your area through their MAC addresses. Pick Report Location if users' place names don't appear. Worried about privacy? Meetro detects your location to within a quarter of a mile, so its servers don't store your exact geographic coordinates. And this app won't display your physical address to other users, so don't worry about an uninvited Meetro user knocking at your door. You can block unwanted contacts, of course. Still, should you fear a potential stalker, as with any online service that strangers can see, you'd be wise to be stingy with the personal details in your profile and photo.

Any lonely souls looking for love at an Internet cafe with Meetro's help might be let down, because the pool of nearby Meetro beta users is slim even in San Francisco, one of the most wired cities in the world. Each time we signed into Meetro beta, the other visible users were mostly men, with only a few nearby in downtown San Francisco, and most located some 20 miles away in Silicon Valley. Upon close inspection, we noticed that hundreds of Random users were scattered around the Americas, hundreds and even thousands of miles away, in Wisconsin, Mexico, and elsewhere.

Meetro beta provides online FAQs and a video tutorial, as well as a feedback link to give the company a piece of your mind. The help-yourself resources aren't as rich as with other big IM brands, but then again you may not need much help because Meetro beta's features are basic.

On the downside, we received error messages more than several times when trying to access basic functions, such as changing our location and peeking at other users' profiles. Meetro is in beta testing and not yet a final product, so glitches are to be expected. Like most other consumer IM tools, Meetro lacks encryption, which the multiclient Trillian provides--and which you might want to have in a tool that pinpoints your location, albeit roughly. Meetro allows you to send files back and forth to your buddies; this could be convenient, save for the risky fact that it lacks malware scanning, which Windows Live Messenger offers for its drag-and-drop file sharing. And if you're looking for multimedia bells and whistles, such as video chat and VoIP plans, you should look to Windows Live Messenger or Yahoo Messenger, which now allow their contacts to text message each other.

We give Meetro credit for its unique concept, but its potential for helping you discover other users remains limited. This could change if more people used Meetro. We wish Meetro beta could show us where our contacts from our third-party IM accounts were located, so we could tap into those trusted human networks; it's too hard to get your contacts to migrate to a new IM client. And Meetro beta's introduction process might work better if it integrated tagging so that you could view people's subjects of interest. Another helpful feature would be the ability to view users' blogs; Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL are already up to that task. Also unlike Meetro, you can hear what music other users are streaming on the Last.fm social networking radio, and Yahoo Messenger lets you snoop on your buddies' Yahoo Music picks. All in all, however, Meetro beta is useful if you want a basic IM tool with an added novelty or one that lets you talk to friends who use other messaging brands.