Many of you have already read Nik’s preview of Mabber over at TechCrunch (if not, go do so now). Mabber is a web-based instant messaging client, with it’s own Jabber network, and mobile phone support. At first it seems as if it’s everything Meebo wishes it could be, unfortunately I intend to be the bearer of bad news.

Registration was easy, I simply used an invite I received from TechCrunch (I have 10, post a comment asking for one if you’d like). Once I registered I created a username and password and then proceeded to enter my login information for any IM networks I used (AIM, Yahoo, and MSN). This is where the hiccups started to occur.

I got connected to the MSN Messenger network easily enough and moved along to AIM, entered my information, then alt-tabbed out of the window while I waited on the AJAX to do it’s asynchronous magic. Unfortunately, mabber threw a bit to much magic dust my way and I returned to 104 (yes, one hundred and four) Internet Explorer windows opened (the little popups, about 150px by 400px). After closing all instances of IE, which deeply upsets me - I hate closing Netvibes - I decided to give it another shot.

After returning to Mabber all seemed well with both my MSN and AIM connections, so I decided to give Yahoo a shot. After adding in my Yahoo informaton Mabber refused to connect to the Yahoo network. A quick glance over their blog and forums returned no excuse for this (other than the mandatory web 2.0 “beta” tag), and warranted yet another minus.

I finally gave up on trying to connect to Yahoo and went to give my buddy list a quick glance over. At first all seemed well (although none of my 116 contacts were online - quite unbelievable), until I noticed only my MSN contacts were listed! My AIM contacts were nowhere to be found. A delete and readdition of my AIM and Yahoo accounts, didn’t help matters much either.

On top of the application simply not working, response times were horrifically slow. On numerous occassions I thought I had lost connection to my network until the “Google.com Shift+F5″ test corrected me.

Beyond technical issues, I simply don’t think Mabber is smart business-wise. Meebo already has a strong following within this niche, first of all. Secondly, instant messaging target audience is teenagers, a majority of which don’t own a cellphone that could run Mabber’s application anyways. Even if they could pay the high dollar for a phone to run the application, why would they not simply pay another $6 per month and get unlimited free text messages?

All in all, Mabber’s a good idea, but Meebo does it better. Mabber Mobile? A horrible idea that will only be used by Silicon Valley nerds until the next big thing comes to mobile messaging, and honeestly - based on Mabber’s performance on my PC, I wouldn’t trust installing it on my cell phone. I like my cell phone to work.