Webware

I got an impenetrable pitch from Meebo Monday about some new features in the company's "Community IM" program that we covered in October. The note said, "Content sites interested in increasing the volume of content sharing, but without their own social graph, can use the multi-network IM feature to expand their reach and drive social interactions."

Following up -- because I do love a puzzle and I remain curious about Meebo's business -- I learned that Meebo is expanding its chat product that sites like CafeMom are using with a few features that link those users into the broader Meebo network and into new Meebo features. And also that Meebo's making money, which I never expected.

Features first: Meebo has had a third-party embeddable (and free) chat product that Web sites can use to give their readers the capability to chat with each other in real time. It works much like Facebook chat, and looks much the same as well. One new feature lets users connect a site-specific chat service into their main Meebo account, which then can connect them to friends from other sites and services.

Meebo adds chat and sharing functions (outlined in orange) to sites like CafeMom.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

So, if I'm on CafeMom, the chat function will show me all my users on Yahoo IM and AIM, and let me publish to my Twitter and Facebook accounts -- all services that Meebo connects to. Another new feature makes it very easy to share Web pages with my Meebo contacts. These additions thus make it easy, and make me more likely, to share a page on the site I'm on with my larger community.

Meebo's Community IM customers like this, since it adds to the viral spread of their content.

As to the revenues, Meebo is claiming that on the main site, its ad banners are getting a 1 percent click-through and that the interactive ads that pop up from the banners have a hard-to-believe minute-and-a-half interaction time, compared to the 0.2 percent / 15-second metrics from standard ad banners (data from Meebo). User dwell time on Meebo is high because the value on the site comes from sticking around on it. Meebo is a real-time social and instant-messaging app. You don't get much out of it if you just check in and leave.

Meebo will soon be goosing its Community IM product by doing two things: It will ad small advertisements to the embedded chat function, and it will share ad revenues with sites that use the feature. Sites will also be able to buy their own ads on the chat service that will appear in the chat window. These new advertising products roll out later this month.

Meebo, a Web service that lets people access instant messaging services from anywhere, announced Monday that it is launching an extension to its ad platform. Starting in the second quarter, Meebo will attempt to expand its reach across the Web by increasing the number of sites that feature integrated Meebo ads. Meebo ads will feature video, apps, games, news, quizzes, product showcases, and more. The ads will go live in the coming weeks.

AirSage, a company that turns real-time cell phone signals into traffic data for popular mapping services like Google Maps, announced that it has enhanced its traffic information and is collecting more than 3 billion anonymous locations of people every day. The service's hallmark product, AirSage Wise Location Data, is available for use through its standard API.

Keyword search company Evri announced Friday that it has cut 25 percent of its staff to help make it through the economic downturn, according to report from VentureBeat.

Wynton Marsalis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, trumpeter, and bandleader, will make his new album, "He and She," available exclusively on iLike for its first 24 hours of availability, the social music site announced Monday. The album will be available all day Tuesday on iLike. By Wednesday, it will be available at other music stores.

Social-bookmarking service Magnolia is in deep trouble. Founder Larry Halff, who has been keeping users up-to-date on progress being made on restoring the company's database server, which suffered from file system corruption last week, said in a blog post on Thursday that he believes that he let the Magnolia community and himself down by using a single backup for the site's data. The company's backup server also suffered from file corruption, leaving the entire site down and all its data unrecoverable.

In the blog post, Halff said he is "currently working with a data recovery company in hopes that (it) can recover a working version of the database." Unfortunately, neither he nor the company is sure if the lost data is recoverable, but he expects an update "as late as next week."

Online-chat application Meebo has added Facebook chat back to its service, the company's chief executive, Seth Sternberg, announced Thursday. According to Sternberg, Meebo is "now the first launch partner of the 'alpha' version of the Facebook Connect plus Chat integration."

In order to connect to Facebook chat through Meebo, users will need to log in to Facebook from the Meebo front page and add Facebook as a network account in the Meebo menu.

Tree.com, a company that owns a number of online properties in the personal-finance sector, announced on Friday that it has acquired personal-finance service Thrive from Loudwater Labs. Although Tree.com is a publicly traded company, the terms of the deal were not disclosed because it did not have a material impact on its financial statements. Thrive will remain an independent entity after the acquisition.

eHire, an online job-matching community, announced on Friday that it will officially launch its service on March 1. According to the company, its technology will allow prospective employees to create profiles containing their resume and qualifications.

Employers can sign up for the site and find qualified candidates by using the company's "matching engine" and scoring mechanism, which use algorithms to determine which candidates may be a good fit for an opening. The company plans to generate revenue from both the candidates and the employers by charging them subscription costs and success-only fees, respectively.

Facebook has instructed Meebo to temporarily take down its newly implemented Facebook Chat integration. According to Meebo, Facebook would like them to, "...connect to their network in a different way." Facebook has committed developers from Chat and Facebook Connect to help Meebo get Facebook Chat up and working on the service again.

To be clear, Facebook is in no way discouraging Meebo from integrating Facebook Chat into its service; it's just asking Meebo to hook-in through a new and most likely more secure method. Facebook has a history of cracking down on unauthorized uses of their data or services. Most notably, we saw Facebook ask Plaxo to stop scraping their data. It's definitely a step in the right direction that Facebook is helping Meebo find a secure solution to Chat integration.

The official response from Meebo is below.

As a bunch of you already know (because you've been using it), we recently added Facebook Chat into Meebo.

We have been speaking to the Facebook team, and it turns out, they'd like us to connect to their network in a different way. In the interim, they asked us take Facebook off Meebo, and we said "okay."

However, we were glad to hear that the Facebook team was genuinely excited to see their network on Meebo, especially since they already have plans to open Facebook Chat. They also committed resources from their Chat and Facebook Connect teams to do extra work with us to get Facebook Chat back on Meebo "really, really soon."

Work began this week, so stay tuned. We expect some all nighters on both sides!

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.

Instant-messaging service Meebo announced on Thursday that it has inked a deal with Hearst Magazines Digital Media that will bring its Meebo Rooms chat tools to the sites of glossies such as Popular Mechanics and Seventeen.

"Meebo is excited to provide readers of Seventeen.com and other Hearst Magazines Digital Media Web sites with a live forum to chat with people who share similar interests and differing opinions," Martin Green, chief operating officer at Meebo, said in a statement.

In tandem with the partnership announcement, Seventeen.com integrated Meebo's technology into its "Style Stars 2008" feature to allow visitors to browse photos, read articles, and watch videos of celebrities while they chatted in real time with others on the site. Hearst believes that the chatting-while-browsing formula will generate a lively community around its properties and help engage audiences more effectively.

And so far, the company is pleased with the results. According to its own figures, Popular Mechanics generated more than 20,000 lines of conversation in the first 48 hours from a single online article, and the Meebo chat room associated with it was loaded about 70,000 times by 30,000 unique visitors.

Meebo's ability to bring its embeddable chat rooms to Hearst is a major victory for the instant-messaging specialist. Although it is largely competing against the likes of Yoomba and eBuddy to serve as a log-in hub for outside messaging services such as those of AOL, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft, embedding chat rooms into other sites makes it unique and adds a new angle for revenue generation that its competitors simply don't have. And if its Meebo Rooms catch on, it could find itself in an extremely lucrative position.

Meebo for Google Android is not a terrible instant-messaging application. But it isn't a very good representation of what IM clients for the Android platform can do, or even a good representation of what Meebo itself can do.

In this first release, the free Meebo mobile application lets you chat with friends on the major IM networks--Yahoo, Windows Live Messenger, AOL, ICQ, Jabber, and Google Talk. It also runs in the background while you work on other applications and scrolls message notifications across the status tray. So far, so good.

However, that about plays out Meebo's feature set on Google Android--a disappointment for a product making its world debut of a native application and a disappointment for a company that has recruited 40 million unique users into its Web-messaging niche.

(Credit: Meebo)

Is it fair for me to hold Meebo to loftier standards? Absolutely. There are certain features common to competitive chat applications on any platform. Having an IM application save your log-in information is a must, and that goes double for a chat app that otherwise asks you to sign into six services every time you talk.

Notifications, simultaneous chats, emoticon support, and options are also must-haves. Of these, Meebo for Google Android has only notifications, and they're easily missed if you glance away from the screen. Though also limited, Meebo's iPhone-optimized site saves log-ins, supports some emoticons, and makes it easy to flip back to the buddy list.

Specific to this Androidized Meebo, I'd like to pick whether I get a buzz, a ding, or a text scroll to signal an incoming message. The organization of the buddy list should also be customizable, so I don't have to wear off the pad of my thumb scrolling through online and offline buddies from each service.

Meebo's team says the Android platform isn't holding back these features. They're just not ready yet. Of course, Meebo says, emoticons and log-in recall are coming 'round the bend. The company just wanted to get the application into users' hands quickly.

Meebo should have waited until there was more to offer.

As it is now, Meebo IM serves a purpose, but it isn't the only multinetwork IM application in the Android Market. Also free is IM+ All-in-One Instant Messenger, which provides a better multinetwork chatting experience on all counts--remembered log-ins, emoticon support, and incoming IM text that appears on the chat window.

Some users have complained about getting forced out of IM+ All-in-One Messenger, though that defect didn't plague my tests. Meebo's next attempt will hopefully bring it in line with this more competitive player.

Meebo is getting into the real-time election chatter game that Current and Twitter (story) have been in with the debates. The company is announcing that it will power the chat rooms for Comedy Central's Indecision2008 Election Day coverage. Comedy Central will also be live blogging the election.

I am a big fan of Meebo's products, although its chat service does have limitations. Only 80 people can enter a chat room, after which the service opens up additional rooms for the overflow crowds. Meebo can handle an indefinite number of these shadow rooms, but they are all separate parties: if you and a friend both log into the same crowded chat, there's no guarantee that you'll end up in the same room. On the other hand, limiting the number of users in a room does keep the conversation manageable; a single chat room with thousands of Comedy Central wannabe pundits would be not just unbearable, but physically unreadable.

Although I like Meebo's services, I've been skeptical of its business model. So I took this announcement as an opportunity to talk with Meebo COO Martin Green (a former CNET employee) about it. The executive summary: Volume. Here's how Meebo works:

First of all, the Comedy Central thing is a branding play. There's no money changing hands. Meebo makes its money by selling performance-based (click-through) advertising, like Google does. And like Google, Meebo works only if it has a large volume of users. Through its embeddable products and its partner deals, it reaches "tens of millions of users," Green says, which is "big enough to matter." (Twitter, please pay attention to this.)

Meebo also learns about its users, both by watching keywords and by gathering demographic information. So if the company wants to package a group of users to advertisers that are, say 18- to 24-year-old males who like action movies, it can do that. And those ads drive engagement, not just passive viewing. "This is where most social networks fall down," Green says. "They have tremendously low click rates. We've just started and we have a very high engagement rate. Our average click rate across all our products is just under 1 percent. And we haven't turned on targeting yet."

Meebo sells performance advertising: clicks, not impressions. It is, in a nutshell, the Google advertising model. At scale, it works.

So I have to admit that it's a good story, and that's not counting the social network effect (where users actively share ads with other users; Green says it happens thousands of times a day) nor Meebo's relatively lean cost structure. It has fewer than 50 people.

If there are things to worry about in Meebo, I would say they are maintaining the clickthrough rates and dealing with big properties that want to use Meebo but don't want Meebo's ads appearing on their sites. But overall, I found Green's business model pitch compelling, especially in an economy where many advertisers should be moving to trackable, measurable ad vehicles over standard image advertising.