Close but not close enough

With the BlackBerry Bold I wanted to be able to step away from my computer but still be connected to the web, well that was easy, but what about Second Life?  It works well cause my IM's go to email when I'm offline so I can respond at any moment, which is nice.  I enjoy the fact that I am available to those who need me.  Well I was really on a hunt for a SL messenger of some sort for mobile phones.  Not running the game or anything but more of a AOL Instant Messenger but for Second Life.  It took a bit but I did find something that could work but not as effectively as I would like it to.  I'll share my thoughts and let you decide.

As far as finding a messenger made just for SL, I had no luck at all but I figured out I could download AIM onto my BlackBerry which took me all of 1 minute.  So nothing wrong there.  Now this product I found is called ChatBridge and like the product name says, it is a bridge between SL and Instant Messenger.  

The following chat programs can be used with ChatBridge:

• MSN
• Yahoo!
• AIM
• ICQ
• Jabber

Now this sounds like the perfect solution.  Well not quite, the problem is that you have to actually have to rez the ChatBridge on a piece of land somewhere, then whatever avatar wants to talk to you needs to click the ChatBridge object and then speak in the open chat whatever they need to say.  Once that has been activated you will receive a IM pop up using one of the programs mentioned.  Once it is clicked and activated anyone within a certain 

distance can be heard.  So if your customer needs to talk to you and you have your ChatBridge located in a location where everyone can see it and a lot of people are there, you are going to get a ton of unwanted IM's.  It costs 5000L for the ChatBridge and there are different types of ChatBridges for your specific need.  They also have a Personal version where you actually transfer the object over to the person and they rez it wherever they are and type as if it was a personal IM.  Last time I checked that item was no copy and costs 3000L.

Shown: Limited Presence Avatar Animated ChatBridge 3400L

So like I said, we are close.  It is the best solution I found out so far unless I'm missing something.  But how about these companies just start with some sort of mobile messenger instead of trying to actually get the game to run on cell phones.  Let's start small and work up.

Be sure to check out the company behind ChatBridge [LINK]  They do have a few different options for you to look through and this maybe something you might want to try depending on your businesses model. Click here [SLURL] to check out their sim in-world along with an example of how ChatBridge looks

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