The Social

Web-based chat company Meebo has partnered with Universal Music Group to bring ad-supported music videos to the service.

As a kickoff, Universal artists Kanye West, Ludacris, and the Killers will be featured on the Meebo home page. In return, Meebo chat rooms will be embedded on Universal artists' sites.

I'm still not quite sure why a chat start-up needs Kanye videos when Mr. West and his many pairs of sunglasses are already plastered all over the rest of the Internet, but I'll let that rest for now.

In the past year, Meebo has launched an application programming interface, partnered with media brands such as Hearst to power embeddable chat rooms, and launched a "Community IM" initiative for social sites.

But Meebo is just the latest of many video partners for Universal. Universal has made investments in Imeem, a music playlist-based social network, and Buzznet, a music fan community hub.

Earlier this year, the label struck a music video deal with Last.fm, a music-focused social network owned by CBS Interactive (which publishes CNET News) and Kiwibox, a community site for teens. Like the major other labels, it has a stake in MySpace Music.

Universal is also reported to be working on a "Hulu-like" site for its music video content. There's no word if that's still on the books, now that music video portal MTV Music has launched.

Web-based chat and IM company Meebo has announced a few updates to its "Community IM" chat project, which it announced this summer as a means to power live chat features on partner sites. More specifically, there are more partners on board to add to the original eight.

According to CEO and co-founder Seth Sternberg, putting Meebo on partner sites will mean that it has a reach of more than 70 million people worldwide. Eventually, there will be ads placed on the chat app, and revenue will be split between Meebo and the partner in question.

As was the plan this summer, movie site Flixster will be the first to roll out Community IM support. Meebo CEO and co-founder Seth Sternberg said that this will be a snail-paced launch. "It's going to do a small rollout over time with a bunch of different partners, mostly because of scaling concerns," he explained. "We wouldn't want to roll it out to everyone all at once and then have the system collapse."

Sternberg said that the company has been smart with its expansion, given the fact that live chat takes a lot of hardware power, and high server costs have been cited as one of the factors that could doom a hyped start-up. "Meebo serves like 35 to 40 million unique (visits) a month right now, on what I think is 150 or less servers. For the number of uniques that we have, our server count is very, very low," he explained. "The server count is certainly going to grow with the Community IM...obviously that's going to put one heck of a strain on the back-end system, but that said, we're being very, very careful."

The current roster of Community IM partners, an array of blog sites, small social networks, and gaming sites, includes: AddictingCames, Bleacher Report, DanceJam, Dhingana, Fanpop, Flixster, GlobalGrind, IBeatYou, MyYearbook, OrangeShark, Piczo, PerfSpot, SparkArt, Sugar Inc., Tagged, UGame.net, Yaari, Zinch, and Zorpia.

Meebo debuted an ad network early this year and opened up the API for its "Meebo Rooms" group chat app.

A look at Flixster, with a Meebo IM window in the bottom right corner.

(Credit: Meebo/Flixster)

Web-based instant-messaging company Meebo has taken a new step forward: bringing its IM technology to partner sites. This fall, Meebo will start powering IM "buddy lists" on a handful of social-media sites so that you can chat with your friends who use those services. They're calling it Community IM.

Right now, the partners announced are the MC Hammer-backed DanceJam, movie fan site Flixster, teen social sites MyYearbook and Piczo, MTV Networks' AddictingGames, SparkArt, women's blog network Sugar, and Tagged.

Altogether, that's more than 54 million users worldwide for Meebo, according to ComScore. But that list will get longer before the service launches, co-founder and CEO Seth Sternberg told me earlier this week. Developers are welcome to check it out now.

The technology itself will undoubtedly remind you of Facebook Chat, the instant-messaging feature that the social network launched earlier this year. It's controlled through a menu bar at the bottom of the site, and will let members know which of their friends are also logged on. The catch is that the window can also pop out, and you can migrate your buddy lists from the likes of Flixster and AddictingGames into the broader Meebo client. Ad revenue will be shared.

Meebo developed the service in response to customer requests, Sternberg told me. And he said it's much-needed, considering traditional IM services often don't reflect all the people with whom we socialize online. "IM is the last communication paradigm that's closed," he told me, and said that Meebo's thinking was to "create one open, federated IM network." It's based on the Jabber open-source platform.

So why make the announcement months before the launch? Sternberg explained that it's mostly to raise awareness and build up interest. But in addition, he said, it's going to be a big project to launch, and he's hoping that engineers looking for jobs will take notice and send their resumes his way.

Web-based instant messaging and chat service Meebo is planning to raise $25-30 million in venture funding, VentureBeat reported Monday.

This would likely peg Meebo's valuation at between $200 and $250 million, a whole lot more than the $60-70 million that it was reportedly worth after a funding round last year. As VentureBeat's Matt Marshall noted, investment banking flop Bear Stearns was just sold for $236 million. Never mind that reports show venture funding may be drying up and the economic forecast hasn't been getting any better recently.

Meebo, which is supported by advertising revenue, has reportedly hired the San Francisco bank Montgomery & Co. to handle the effort, and some big names in the social-networking space--possibly even Facebook or News Corp.'s MySpace.com--may be interested. MySpace operates its own instant-messaging service, and Facebook is rumored to have one in the works.

Online video start-up Joost, which focuses on ad-supported professional content, made a few headlines (and raised a few eyebrows) for inking some big advertising deals with major corporations before the downloadable software was even open to the public. Until this point, most of those advertisements were traditional video advertisements that popped up before and in between clips on Joost.

That's no longer the case. On Thursday, Joost announced that Coca-Cola's European division has created the first "commercial widget" for the software. Called "Coke Bubbles," the downloadable advertising widget lets you choose a clip on Joost and then send it to fellow Joost users, appended with a note in the form of a "bubble."

So, in essence, it's a bit like those Pop-Up Video shows that VH-1 did back in the '90s, except not quite as customizable.

Social media advertising is still an extremely young sector of the industry, and plenty of observers are wondering whether it will actually work; many agree, however, that some element of interactivity needs to be present to bring the experience beyond a banner or video ad that will likely be ignored.

But according to Joost, widgets on the software will go beyond advertising. Coca-Cola has also partnered with Joost on an initiative to help more developers create applications for the video software; Joost will be holding "Developer Days" events in London on Friay, in Amsterdam on December 1, and in New York on December 7. (In London? The event will run from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. GMT, at Wallacespace on 2 Dryden Street.)

Joost has also partnered with instant-messaging start-up Meebo to power chat operations among viewers.

Who needs downloads? Not instant-messaging fans, apparently, according to Nielsen NetRatings. The online division of the legendary statistics-crunching company just released a study that tracks the fastest-growing instant-messaging software products from August 2006 to June 2007, and the results indicate that Web-based is the way to go.

Meebo's Ajaxy prettiness

(Credit: Meebo)

The most rapidly growing IM client, according to the study, is Meebo, which launched just over a year ago. The fact that it's so new may be partially responsible for its rapid growth--354 percent from August 2006 to June 2007. But Meebo also packs a double punch: not only is it Web-based and offers embed features so that you can literally IM from your blog, but it's also a "universal IM" service that can aggregate your buddy lists from AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, and Google Talk. Desktop-based universal IM clients like Trillian and Adium might not be growing as quickly as Meebo is, but they nevertheless continue to spread as people realize that having one buddy list open is a lot easier than two or three.

Additionally, Meebo received some more buzz when it launched media-rich, embeddable chat rooms this spring.

The second-fastest-growing client, according to the study, may be riding the wave of novelty--it's Imvu, a downloadable client that specializes in 3D avatar chat that's not unlike Second Life; according to the study, it's grown 154 percent over the past 10 months. In third place, with 149 percent growth, is Google Talk--another service that's grown thanks to Web-based use, as it's integrated directly into the Gmail home page.

After those three, the fourth and fifth in Nielsen NetRatings' top five showed a significant drop in growth--Paltalk, which specializes in video chat (and is headquartered in my hometown of NYC) was listed as having 26 percent growth, and Skype's integrated IM was in fifth place with 20 percent.