Meebo is adding File Transfer capabilities to its instant messaging service tonight. You can now send and receive files to your friends on or off Meebo, regardless of which instant messaging client your friends use. That's right: effortless file transfer between different IM networks, all done through the Meebo.com website.
While other chat tools like AOL Instant Messenger enable file transfer already, they are limited to sharing files with other users on the same chat client. With most of the top IM clients not working together, Meebo is doing a great job of bridging the gaps.
And with 6 million Meebo users, they could have an impact here. The more functionality they can pack into this client to replicate normal IM carriers, the more of the user's IM time they'll eat up. Currently, this feature only works with Internet Explorer and Firefox. They soon expect it to be available in Safari. Interestingly, they're using Amazon's S3 and EC2 services to move the files around.