Jybe ho!

No, that title isn't some sort of a slur. Being a sailor (or former one, when I lived in Florida), "jibe ho" is what you yell as your boat jibes and the boom comes swinging across the deck of the boat (and pity the fool who doesn't duck in time). Here's a video of what a jibe looks like.

Anyway, as someone who's been committed to the full-blown, fancy web contact center software model for chat reference for a while, I've been wondering if Jybe is something I should be paying more attention to before I get whacked by it.

I wanted to pass along my thoughts about Jybe, now that I've given it a proper test run with Meredith Farkas from Information Wants to Be Free. But Meredith has gone and written a better account of the pros and cons than I could have, so go read her post instead.

A note of thanks is due to the following folks for alerting me to Jybe in the first place and making it sound compelling enough to merit experimentation:

• Paul Pival at the Distant Librarian (among others on this site, see this post)
• Sarah Houghton at the Librarian in Black (see this post)
• Michael Stephens at Tame the Web (among others on this site, see the 4/19/2005 post titled "Jybe 2.0 is Here (RIP VR)")
• Randy Reichardt on Scitech Library Question (see this post)
• Karen Coombs on Library Web Chic (see this post)