Over the past few days I have been weighing up the pros and cons for the Wibiya Toolbar and the Meebo Toolbar. For those that haven’t heard of either of the bars basically the bars allow sharing and social integration for your site. It can be beneficial as users can share your articles on a variety of social platforms and spread your articles even further across the web.

Here at WebM.ag you can see the bar in action at the bottom of the page, the Meebo bar is active on Mashable at present and gives a great example of the bar and its uses.

Both bars are superb and really do serve a great purpose, but which one to choose? This is the question myself and many other people have asked or are asking right now.

I installed both bars (separately of course!) to get a better understanding of each, which I have detailed below:

Installation

Wibiya: The Wibiya bar is very easy to install on Wordpress, its just a case of uploading and activating a plugin.

The other Platforms supported are Blogger, Typepad, Drupal, Joomla, Ning and other/custom platforms, if the platform doesn’t use plugins its basically a small section of code to add in your template.

Meebo: Again Meebo has a Wordpress plugin (Wordpress.com hosted blogs not supported) which is a really simple install.

It also supports Typepad, Blogger, Movable Type and other/custom platforms, again its just a case of copying and pasting a small section of code to your pages.

Result: I would have to call a tie here, both are so easy to add to your site nobody should really struggle getting the bars up and running.

Content Sharing

Wibiya: Wibiya has a great range of content sharing options: Email, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Myspace and more are supported, and just one click gets you ready to share with your friends and followers.

Meebo: Meebo struck me as limited with the sharing options, Email, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo, IM and a few others are supported, although the drag and drop sharing feature is very swish.

Result: I would have to say whilst Meebos content sharing looks really well polished and cool, they are hindered by a lack of options, so I would have to choose Wibiya on this one.

Social Features

Wibiyia: Wibiya has scope to link Facebook fan pages and you can read comments and such through the bar itself. With Twitter you can tweet from the bar and view @ messages and tweets. It has a chat feature through TinyChat, but I wasn’t overly impressed with it.

Meebo: Supports Facebook fan pages, but only shows fans avatars and Twitter is limited. It does have a very good chat feature I must admit, which you can pull contacts in from Facebook and Aim for example, the only downside is you have to register through Meebo to use the chat feature.

Result: I think the chat feature just swings it for Meebo, the registration isn’t too painful and the limited Twitter and Facebook Fan Pages surely will be improved upon soon.

Other Features

Wibiya: Wibiya has a good range of features, including Search, Translation, Random Post, RSS, Live Notifications, Galleries, Games and Real Time Users to name a few, and more features seem to be added regularly.

Meebo: Meebo doesn’t have a great range of addons, it has for example Flickr, RSS, Random Page as well as the chat and social sharing features.

Result: Wibiya has a larger range of features and could keep your users occupied and interested with the selection on offer.

Design

Both bars have a similar design as both use the space in pretty much the same way and both bars have the hide option. The Wibiya bar allows further customisation of colour and offers a selection of colours to compliment your sites design. So on the basis of better site colour co-ordination Wibiya wins this round.

Overall

Both bars have really great potential and usability, but in the end I opted to stick with Wibiya, Meebo had enough to make me seriously consider a swap, but the extra social features and content sharing kept me on the Wibiya side of the fence.

What is certainly worth a mention is the fact the Meebo Bar is still in BETA, so there is a fair chance the bar will continue to make huge improvements, there certainly is enough interest in the bar.

Thank you for reading, I hope I give some insight to my decision and hopefully my thoughts can help you make your decision, whether it be for Wibiya or Meebo.

Over To You!

You can find the bars here:

Wibiya Bar: wibiya.com
Meebo Bar: meebo.com

And if you have an opinion please take a moment to vote in the Wibiya vs Meebo Poll in the sidebar.

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