Francois pointed out San Francisco based Meetro for me and I liked them instantly. Apparently Meetro are getting a lot of buzz in Silicon Valley lately. No wonder. Their user centric, up-to-date style is indeed refreshing. While at first Meetro may look like “yet another unified IM”, they glue it all around a very effective use case that makes a lot of stand alone sense if done right - focusing on proximity with your buddies.

Or in their own words: “Technically speaking, Meetro is radius and proximity based software. Untechnically speaking, it finds like-minded people around you instantly. Wherever you are. So whether you’re in-town or out of town, Meetro gets you on the town with old friends or new acquaintances”

Location based IM? Filter your buddy list by proximity? That can make some IM use cases very effective if done properly!

Meetro is PC based, is 100% compatible with the 4 major IMs (MSN / Y! / AIM / ICQ) and has some compatability with Google, MySpace and Friendster. It also collects an independent profile with one very important piece of information - your actual address.

A little bit of backwind (currently ranked around 70,000 in Alexa) and some critical mass and Meetro can definitely take off above the noise.

It’s not like Meetro are free of adolescent flaws. The registration is a way too long, it took me 3 tries to finally download the software. Their compliance with MySpace and Google is not full. The viral features seems a bit too aggressive - if you’re not careful all your contacts will receive an invitation (spam) blast - but it seems like the Meetro folks are betting it on virality. Users are openly invited to join as Meetro agents and, in this case, it seems very proper.

Having a look at the website is worth the time. Open, opinionated, interesting, fun. Great blog with no corporate slogans. It’s clear they know what user centric really means. A bunch of young fellas who clearly enjoy what the do and that have managed to put together a serious offering.

I find it both Web 2.0 and Fun 2.0. I hope you do too.