Meebo users, import your chat history to Imo

Google acquired Meebo back in the beginning of June and it quickly became clear that the majority of services and tools that Meebo offered would be pulled from the Internet. A few days later we looked at several Meebo alternatives for users of the service and sorted them into web-based and desktop software alternatives.

One of the services that we recommended was Imo, a web-based messaging service that offered a similar feature set. Today, Imo announced that Meebo users can import their chat history to their service.  The chat history is a log of all conversations that took place using Meebo's service, and the ability to have the data still available is certainly a strong selling point for users looking to migrate to another web-based messaging service.

Update: The offer to export your chat history has expired. It is no longer available.

Here is what Meebo users need to do to export and import their chat history:

• Sign into Meebo's new Chatlog Download page and select download chat logs on the page afterwards. This downloads all past conversations as a log file to the local computer.

• Go to imo.im and sign in with all accounts that you want to import the chat history for. If you have used Facebook, Google Talk and MSN for instance, sign in to all three services and make sure you are logged in.
• Once you did that, select Preferences in the accounts menu, and there the Import Chat History option.

• Select the downloaded Meebo history file and then Import. You should see a list of all accounts found in the chat log and the number of messages for each.

The progress of the chat history import is also listed on the page, and you should see a green check mark next to each account once the importing has finished successfully.

Here is a video that is demonstrating the importing into Imo.im.

Closing Words

The option to import your Meebo chat history puts Imo.im at the top of our recommendations lists when it comes to Meebo alternatives. I'd suggest you download your chat history as soon as possible as it will eventually no longer be possible to download it.