Last friday, Dutch students rallied against a new law enforcing a minimum of 1040 hours of study each year.

Interestingly enough, they used Instant Messaging to start the rally. The call to strike spread over the internet like wildfire, winning out over media such as mobile phones and email.

The development team behind the new eBuddy web messenger has been working for some time now to make this client our future flagship product. While we are working on this client we are usually focused on certain themes or sets of (new) features, like conferencing or the support of a new network. Since it’s a new client, features like this are usually quite visible for you, the end-user and you can follow the progress we are making if you log in regularly. However, this doesn’t mean we spend all our time on the creation and development of these new features. Recently we’ve been focused on improving the performance of our client.

Performance has always been an important theme in software development and in every project it means something different. In our case we decided we wanted to dive into three different areas: the contacts tree, the chat tabs and the chat editor. For each of these areas we wanted to greatly improve the responsiveness so users spend less time waiting and more time chatting.

In this blog post I’ll dive a little deeper in what our approach was for each of the problems to give you a little insight in the work behind what we feel is the best chat client on the web. Please let us know how you feel about our efforts.

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Ryan Joseph from the Dastardly Report spend a day using only the new eBuddy Web Messenger. We’re very happy to report he really liked it, favouring it over other web clients.

Here are some snippets from his review:

Ebuddy was actually my favorite of all three programs I tested. It was the only one that didn’t try to simulate the desktop environment and did its own thing. When you first go to the page, you can select one of 5 instant message systems, MSN, AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk, and MySpace Messenger. This was the only one of the three I tested that supported MySpace.

I honestly didn’t have any problems with ebuddy. It was very fast, very smooth, and easy to use. To sign into more than one account at a time, just click the wrench at the top, then accounts.”

Ebuddy is the only one of the three I tested that I can actually see myself using on a semi-regular basis when I’m away from my computer. I really liked it.

To read the full review, head on over to the Dastardly Report blog. Or just jump in and try to new eBuddy Web Messenger for yourself and see how you like it!

Our new buddy Halovidnoob has made another review, this time of our latest product: the eBuddy Web Messenger Beta. Seems to go down much better than the previous version, good to be making progress!

Okay, JPEGs should just work as an avatar picture… Seems we need to do a bit more work there!

Halovidnoob did two YouTube video reviews on eBuddy.

At first it sucks:

Then it rocks!

Mr. Halovidnoob, thanks for the reviews! You might want to try out our new version, I’m pretty sure you will like it much much better. Go give it a whirl here, maybe you can make another video review!