The Social

Web-based chat company Meebo has announced that it now supports MySpace and Facebook's instant-messaging services. That adds to a lineup that already includes Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Instant Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, and ICQ.

"Today's announcement reflects Meebo's long-time goal of offering open access to all IM and social-networking users, as well as providing them with the best IM experience possible," co-founder and CEO Seth Sternberg said in a release. "People have friends across a variety of different social networks, and Meebo is a place where they can come for real-time social interactions with these friends, at any time."

MySpace launched MySpaceIM last year, and this year Facebook launched Facebook Chat. Neither has been a wild hit, but adding them to Meebo's arsenal certainly gives the ad-supported service access to a bigger audience. A number of other universal IM clients--like Trillian, Adium, and Digsby--already support either or both of them.

Meebo also has launched a "Community IM" project to power instant messaging on other social sites like Flixster and MyYearbook.

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.

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.

Facebook Chat might've had a simple and quiet launch, but a month later, the social network is already announcing plans to upgrade.

Engineer David Reiss announced Tuesday evening on the Facebook Developer Blog that Facebook Chat will soon have an Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) interface--that's better known as Jabber. This will mean that external clients will be able to incorporate Facebook Chat, currently restricted in most cases to the browser.

Universal IM clients Digsby (which is PC-only) and Adium (which is Mac-only) have already worked in ways to support Facebook Chat.

Through Facebook's official Jabber support, which is coming "in the near future," Facebook members will be able to not only chat with their friends, but also see friends' profile pictures through the IM client and set their Facebook statuses.

Facebook announced Wednesday morning that its in-browser Facebook Chat feature is now live to all members, over two weeks after it first debuted to a limited number of users.

It was clear that Facebook was concerned with the stability of the chat application, first debuting it on a Sunday when many members--not to mention tech bloggers eager to report any flaw or bug--might not be at their computers.

The social network then rolled out Facebook Chat incrementally, with different "networks" on the site--geographic regions, colleges, companies--gaining access to it before others so that the new feature could stay under control. Some had the feature as early as April 6; a number of large networks couldn't access it until very recently.

Facebook now has nearly 70 million users.

Last year, Microsoft launched the "I'm Initiative," which donated nibbles of advertising revenue to 10 selected charities each time a Windows Live Messenger user started an instant message with the word "I'm." On Tuesday, after a year of the gimmick, Microsoft representatives announced that $1.3 million had been netted so far.

Bill Gates would be proud.

"Because of your enthusiasm, we're also excited to announce that we will be continuing this program," Windows Live Messenger product manager Dharmesh Mehta wrote in a blog post. "And with no set limit on the amount donated to each organization, the more 'I'm' conversations people have, the more money that goes toward addressing some of the world's most urgent social issues."

The 10 nonprofits receiving donations from the I'm Initiative are the American Red Cross, the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, the Humane Society of the United States, the National AIDS Fund, the National MS Society, NineMillion.org, the Sierra Club, StopGlobalWarming.org, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, and UNICEF. Windows Live Messenger users who want to participate are asked to choose which organization they want to receive their click funds; the precise amounts netted by each one were not disclosed, but Microsoft has said that each one has received a minimum of $100,000. The I'm Initiative has also sponsored Cause Effect, a program about social action on the MTV Networks channel MTVU, which is syndicated on college campus broadcast networks.

Mehta wrote in his blog post that Microsoft is considering adding other charities to the list.

Facebook chose a Sunday afternoon, when much of the tech blogger corps was pleasantly enjoying real life (we can hope), to start rolling out its previously announced instant-messaging client. That's likely no coincidence: this is a major new feature for the social-networking site, and debuting it on a weekend afternoon probably ensured a smoother integration.

A Facebook employee told me in the days before the launch that it was "a big challenge" to get ready to roll out Facebook Chat to the site's 67 million members. Because of that, Facebook has opted for a gradual rollout rather than a large-scale launch to all members at one time. The in-browser client, which lets members of the site talk to their Facebook friends who are logged in, is still not live on many Facebook accounts--mine, for example.

Facebook has earned criticism from some performance monitoring firms for unreliability, and the Techmeme set is notorious for not cutting companies a whole lot of slack--remember when Google relaunched Blogger late in 2006? After "Beacongate," Facebook doesn't need another PR debacle.

And as an extra precaution, the debut version of the application is extremely light. There is no support for external IM clients yet, though the company has said it's exploring Jabber support. For now, that means it probably won't be pulling chat-friendly Web users away from their existing services (the AIMs, Yahoos, and Google Talks of the world) and clients like Meebo and Adium. Yet.

In that respect, the launch of Facebook Chat is much like the history of Facebook itself. The service famously started in a Harvard dorm and was limited to students with Harvard e-mail addresses before gradually rolling out to other universities, then companies, and finally the general public.

Considering the site remains the toast of the town all over Silicon Valley nearly a year after the launch of its developer platform thrust it into the spotlight, it looks like they've been pretty successful in spite of that caution.

The new addition to Facebook likely won't have the impact of drawing new members or "converting" people from other social networks. Where it will make a difference, however, is on the amount of time that members spend on the site, which can make a big difference for advertisers.

On the flip side, this could spell doom for those hours you whittle away on Facebook at the office all day. If your boss hasn't blocked access to the site yet, browser-based instant messaging could be the final straw.

CNET News.com's Dan Farber co-wrote this report.

Social network Facebook will roll out more extensive privacy controls Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, as well as an instant-messaging service soon after, representatives from the company announced during a press briefing at the company's headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.

Most notable about the new privacy controls is the fact that Facebook members will now be able to choose how much of their profiles is visible to those on their friends list.

Naomi Gleit, Facebook's product manager for privacy and internationalization, previewed the updated options, which include a new "Friend of Friends" option based on social proximity--not unlike LinkedIn profiles, in which profile information is visible to second- and third-degree contacts rather than the site's members as a whole. Facebook members will also be able to include or exclude certain friends from having access to information.

In December, Facebook added the ability to create custom groups of friends, but aside from sending out group messages, there's not much that can currently be done with them. With this week's update, Facebook will integrate this function with its privacy controls. For example, a user could hide or show private information, such as e-mail address and phone numbers, from friends or groups using the classifications "Friend of Friends," "All Friends," "Some Friends," or "Only Me." This means that individuals on a friends list can have specific privacy settings, Gleit said. Whenever a Facebook member sends or confirms a friend request, he or she can assign privacy settings.

These new features, according to Facebook representatives, have already been extensively tested. Gleit explained that users have been asking for them, and said they will not have a negative impact on the thousands of third-party developers building applications for Facebook's platform.

Company executives discussed the ongoing evolution of the social network and explained that changes to the site's privacy controls are necessary given its rapid growth and increasingly diverse user base. Matt Cohler, vice president of strategy and business operations, reiterated a common Facebook talking point--that the social network is designed to facilitate better, more-personal ways to share and communicate information. Also central, he said, is the fact that Facebook's product allows users to have control over their personal information.

"It manifests itself in two parts in the product. Tools have to be powerful for giving granular control, but on the other hand you have to make sure they are easy to use and simple and intuitive," Cohler explained. "Keeping those two things together has been something we've always thought about."

He described how Facebook began as a service for American college students--indeed, a university e-mail address was required to register--but four years later the user base, now numbering 67 million, has changed dramatically. Two-thirds of Facebook members are now outside the U.S., compared with just 10 percent 18 months ago.

"We think there are basic principles at the core that hold true," Cohler said.

But that's not all. As was rumored, Facebook will be launching an instant-messaging service, called Facebook Chat, which should be out in two weeks. Product manager Peter Deng gave a sneak peek of the service.

"When you log in to the site there is a Chat (user interface) at the bottom of the browser...It's unobtrusive and there when you need it," Deng said. No download will be required for Chat, which integrates with a user's Facebook friends list, and it works with all browsers. Members can hold multiple conversations, log on and off easily, keep the conversation going as they navigate through different pages on Facebook, and pop the chat up into a new window.

"We want Facebook to be part of your experience all over the Web," Cohler said. "Our business is not to make Facebook an island."

It sounds like Facebook Chat is too light of an application to pose a big threat to existing instant-messaging clients--at least for now. There's no limit to the number of chats a member can hold at a time, but they're all one-on-one (no group chats). There's also no "away message" function, just "idle" notifications if a member is logged in but has been away from the keyboard.

Additionally, Chat is restricted to Facebook alone. There's no API for it, so third-party services like Meebo can't access it. But the company is looking at Jabber support, which would mean that it could access external instant-messaging services much the way Google Talk does.

"We are looking at whether we will integrate it or not," Cohler said of Jabber. He added that other features in Chat are on the way, but not immediately.

Conversations in Facebook Chat are automatically archived for 90 days, after which the system clears them, but Facebook members will be able to clear their chat histories manually at any given time.

After the presentation, Cohler was asked about the company's relationship with the independent developers creating applications for it, perhaps because of concerns that Facebook would create an internal application that would rival third-party ones. "We develop our apps at parity with developers," he answered. "You can remove our apps and use other applications instead, and we don't make that difficult to do."

In addition, Cohler said, Facebook is hoping to strengthen its relationships with its developer community, perhaps holding another large-scale developer event like the one it held when it first launched the Facebook Platform last May.

See also: TechCrunch video of the Facebook Chat demo