Weird names, cool apps.

Here a a couple new interesting AJAX web apps I ran across– Meebo and Zimbra.

“Meebo”:http://www4.meebo.com/ is an AJAX instant messaging service that allows to use Firefox or IE to conduct real-time IM chats on AOL, Yahoo, GTalk, and MSN. In the 3 weeks since they’ve launched they’ve had hundreds of thousands of logins and millions of messages sent. Creating a scalable AJAX instant messaging backend is especially challenging, so I’m interested in learning more about how the backend scales.

“Zimbra”:http://www.zimbra.com is an open-source Exchange-killer backend combined with a really slick Ajax client. If you haven’t tried it yet, give the “Zimbra demo”:http://www.zimbra.com/demo a try. (Tim Brennan, one of my coworkers at Avogadro, was one of their earliest employees.)

I was floored by the demo. You never miss the fact that you’re not running a native Windows app– in fact it beats Outlook in several areas including search and smart tooltips. You can hover on a date and see appointments for that date, or hover on a web page and see a thumbnail. The backend even supports the ability to plug in custom tooltips.

Web apps are bad at displaying long scrolling lists, but apps like Zimbra and Gmail show that good and fast searching and tagging capabilities more than compensate for this lack. Why scroll and sort a huge inbox when search is faster and easier?

The calendaring app is equally slick.

My only complaint is that page response on the demo server is sometimes a little sluggish, but presumably hosting the service yourself would it make it fast.

To be an Exchange killer, Zimbra still needs to prove in practice that an install can stand up to thousands of users and millions of messages. Then there are other nagging details like Blackberry integration.

Still, if I were Microsoft, I’d be concerned.