People say this about every software innovation when it first appears. It's too heavy. It uses too much CPU. It's bloated.
There's always a subset of computer-savvy people who don't think it's hard to install software, configure machines, use text-only interfaces, monitor their CPU and Memory usage closely... but often they forget that they aren't the majority.
obviously many people either don't care or don't even realize (and thus don't care) the app takes up more memory. sure, there are opportunity costs to everything. people who use meebo or like-minded apps reap more benefits from the convenience than from the memory tradeoff. until someone comes up with something better, I don't see what the complaint is.
I think it's an interesting position for the author to take. I didn't expect this article to be about the amount of memory that meebo takes up. Although I have noticed that it can get pretty sluggish.
More importantly, one of two things will happen as they become more common: either computers will just come with more memory, or browsers will become optimized for these particular tasks. The market rules, not the limits of the machine.
There's always a subset of computer-savvy people who don't think it's hard to install software, configure machines, use text-only interfaces, monitor their CPU and Memory usage closely... but often they forget that they aren't the majority.