This guest post was written by Seth Sternberg, the CEO and Co-founder of Meebo. His last guest post was about the job of a pre-launch startup CEO.  In this one, he discusses how that job changes when your company grows to 200 people.

The job of CEO at a 200 person company is pretty different from the life I had 6 years ago—just before Meebo launched. It’s a lot less about what I do and a lot more about how I enable others. In today’s world, if you zoom out to a very macro-level view, there are three things I do. 1. Strategy. 2. People. 3. Resource allocation.

Strategy

You always hear that part of a CEO’s job is to come up with the “strategy”. But what does that really mean? In my world it’s listen, synthesize and communicate.

Listening means listening to everyone. Blogs, your employees, the press, other entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, customers and users—anyone who might have an interesting or informative point of view on what your company does. Bandied together, those constituencies form your market.

Synthesizing means taking all those things you’ve been listening to, deciphering signal (10% of it) from noise (90% of it), and adjusting course based on new points of view or new information. It’s rare that you’ll gather the exact strategy you should follow from the signal, but put it together and apply your own secret sauce and you have your winner.

And finally you communicate the newly formed strategy (to the extent you’ve decided to adjust course) to the market – the same people you’ve been listening to. At the end of day, you are your company’s chief sales person. To investors, the press, recruits, customers and users. You need to convince all of these people you’ve been listening to that you heard them, you internalized it all, and you came up with the winning strategy.

Together, I call these three pieces The Strategy Funnel. You listen, you synthesize and communicate and then you start all over again, listening to the feedback after you’ve communicated.

People

So many things are happening on a daily basis that it becomes very hard to stay on top of it all. In fact, you really can’t. Rather, you rely on your team to truly own the pieces of the overall puzzle that they are responsible for. This requires lots of things, top among them is trust.

First, you need to make sure you have the right folks in the right positions. Beyond ensuring that their skills (both hard and soft) are right for the role, you need to make sure that they continue to scale into that role as it inevitably becomes more complex with the growth of the company. Someone who was great at 100 people may hit a wall at 160 people.

Second, you need to make sure that these people are empowered to run their parts of the show. A lot of this empowerment comes through information, which of course needs to be communicated in some way. Counterintuitive as it may seem, ensuring that communication lines are very high bandwidth within the company is one of the top things you can do to empower people. Well…that, and not be a micromanager.

Third, you need to make sure you’ve clearly communicated the mission to your folks. If your leadership team doesn’t understand the mission or strategy, then neither will their respective teams. Watch how quickly progress will grind to a halt without a clearly articulated strategy in place—it won’t be pretty.

Fourth, you are your company’s chief recruiter. If one of our teams needs me to sell a candidate, I’ll get on the phone day or night, weekday or weekend. Heck, I’ve even flown out to see a candidate or two if they’re someone super special. Your company lives or dies by its team, regardless of whether you’re 2 people or 200. Attract the absolute best and brightest to work with your team and you’re already winning.

Resource Allocation

As your company grows and leaders at your company come to run specific functions, each function will vie for the company’s resources to best achieve its goals. Let’s unpack that for a minute. Since you can’t know everything that’s happening within the company, and therefore rely on your leadership team to run their respective functions, how do you make sure everyone’s on the right track? You provide clear goals for them to achieve. You measure these goals through a set of mutually agreed upon metrics that they are working to attain. Often, they will have a bonus tied to the achievement of these goals. So not only is there a sense of professional pride with meeting goals, but a bonus is often on the line too. And since you’re already hiring fantastic people who are intrinsically motivated, these people will work very hard to achieve their own team goals and thusly, the company’s goals.

One of the ways folks work to achieve their goals is to draw resources from the company. Some services are often shared at the corporate level—recruiting, HR, facilities and financial analysis would be an example. Other services are often shared between teams. For example, the ads team is as dependent on our engineering team to provide them with enough engineers to build new ad products as is our consumer products team to build the (very cool) checkins service we’re working on at Meebo. The leaders of these teams, at some level, compete for these shared resources—the more they get—the more likely they are to meet their goals.

You, as the CEO, are the ultimate “disinterested third party” between each of these teams. You, more than anyone, are tasked to make certain that the overall company meets its goals—not just its revenue goals or product goals, but all of them! As such, you make the call on how resources are allocated between competing priorities within the company.

That’s the end of the formal programming. Strategy, People and Resource Allocation are the three things I really spend my time on. But before we part, just one more thing. You are human. You make mistakes. You get stressed. But at all times, be real! Your people and your market want to hear from you—they want to know you and know what you stand for. They can sniff bullshit a mile away. Don’t disengage with reality behind the CEO’s magic curtain—it’s all too easy. Keep it real.

Like many start-ups, Meebo has been on a recent hiring spree. In this episode of Founder Stories, CEO Seth Sternberg tells Chris Dixon, “for 12 weeks we had to hire a salesperson a week and if we didn’t we would have missed our revenue numbers later this year.”

But it’s not just new salespeople populating Meebo’s workstations. “We started this year at about 130 employees.  I think we are at 175 now, and so for us that is really fast growth” says Sternberg.

From CFO to engineer, Sternberg discusses how Meebo weeds out candidates by running them though, “the sim.” This is a simulation of Meebo’s real-world working environment.

In our “rapid fire” segment below, Sternberg tells Dixon some of his favorite products, what he would do if he ever left Meebo and discusses his thirst for hitting the road—and air.

Make sure to watch Part 1 and Part 2 of this interview, as well as prior episodes of Founder Stories here.

Should founders innovate based upon customer feedback or is it better to develop from within and let consumer adapt. In this episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon, Meebo’s Seth Sternberg discusses his philosophy: “Users tend to be very good at giving you incremental product suggestions.”  But they are not product visionaries. “They may be asking for something that would be revolutionary,” he says, “but they don’t realize they are asking for it.”

When receiving such incremental suggestions, Sternberg instinctively skips the baby steps and instead asks the question, “what if we could completely change the game?”

Sternberg explains what he means in the video above.

In the below clip, Sternberg and Dixon touch on Meebo’s advertising strategy, connecting with consumers and measuring user engagement. Meebo ads have a one percent engagement rate, well above the norm for run-of-the-mill display ads.

Make sure to view prior episodes of Founder Stories by clicking here.

Meebo, which connects users with their friends across social platforms, emerged from the ashes of an idea Seth Sternberg and his team had for “file sharing between friends that had IM in it.” Those early days of development saw more misses than hits—“kind of depressing” says Sternberg in this episode of Founder Stories.

After more than a year of tinkering, Meebo finally found its magic formula and launched in 2005. Right from the get-go they heard from their users, but admittedly didn’t totally grasp the scope of what they created. As Sternberg admits, “a lot of commerce sites were calling, bloggers were calling and we did not get it.”

In the above clip, Sternberg explains why.

In part II of the interview below, Sternberg and host Chris Dixon discuss the importance of understanding the respective roles of the team—and keyed in on the evolving role of the businessperson.

“I was the one who couldn’t code, therefore I was the CEO,” says Sternberg. “As the businessperson pre-launch I was buying the sandwiches… frankly the businessperson for a start up doesn’t do a lot pre-launch,” he says. Dixon comments on this thought by saying, “I have seen teams breakup before they got to that point because of that feeling of imbalance.”

However, such perceived imbalance can quickly turn into an invaluable asset. As Dixon and Sternberg note, it is the businessperson who can help strike deals and raise money for the team once the engineers actually have something worth selling.

Part II of the interview is below.

Past episodes of Founder Stories can be found here.

We’re back with another episode of TC Cribs, taking you inside the offices of some of the tech world’s hottest companies. This episode features Meebo, which rose to popularity as a multi-protocol web-based chat client, and has since gotten tons of traction with their Meebo Bar (not to be confused with the numerous drinking holes located in the office, as you’ll see in the episode)).

Tune in to learn about Meebo’s traditions, their giant cookies, their hidden staircase to the happiest place on Earth, and the wooden board they call a ‘rock wall’ that is much, much harder than it looks. Seriously, it’s really hard. You’ll see. And do be sure to watch til the end.

Also be sure to check out our past episodes of TC Cribs:

As always, credit to Ashley Pagán and John Murillo for the camera work, and to Mr. Murillo for the fantastic editing (he’s seriously a wizard).

• Inside The Psychobox: A Tour Of Dropbox’s Bumping Office
• Take A Doc On The Wild Side At Scribd (With Bonus Go Karts!)
• Dogs, Unicorns, And Mysterious Gongs: Inside Yelp’s 5-Star Pad
• TC Cribs: IGN HQ Gets Its Game On With Lawn Gnomes, Plumbers, And Creepy Dinosaurs
• TC Cribs: From Frenchmen To Randy Raccoons, An Inside Look At Seesmic
• TC Cribs: Inside The Snuggified Home Of Posterous

But as big as Meebo’s reach is, they recognize that people aren’t always going to be sitting at their desks checking in to website. So they’re taking the experience mobile.

The lastest version of Meebo’s iPhone chat client, launching today, gives users the check-in experience on the go. This way, when you’re browsing your favorite websites from your iPhone, you’ll be able to quickly check-in and share them just as you would from Meebo’s MiniBar.

Of course, this isn’t quite as seemless as on the desktop. Because Apple’s doesn’t allow for system-wide extensions, the Meebo check-in system on the iPhone requires that you’re browsing sites through their app to be able to check-in. But Meebo has built a nice “Updates” area of the app that allows you to view social streams from the likes of Twitter and Facebook, so you can easily find things to browse.

“The mobile app launch is bringing our nascent web checkin system to mobile. This is Meebo’s solution to solve something that we think is lacking in the web today: the ability to harness the discoveries of people with interests like our own while simply browsing the web,” Meebo founder Seth Sternberg says.

“Nielsen data says that people spend about 1/3 of their time on communication hubs and 2/3 of their time in the rest of the web — much of which is exploring points of interest. This interest-driven behavior represents a huge part of people’s everyday browsing and we think it is where the focus of the social web is headed next,” he continues.

Meebo also just rolled out the MiniBar to Microsoft’s IE web browser, still the most widely-used browser in the world.

The larger Meebo Bar is now on some 8,000 sites around the web. And as you can see in the Quantcast chart below, it’s helping Meebo grow very, very quickly.

You can find the latest version of Meebo for the iPhone here.

Editor’s Note: The following guest post is written by a Silicon Valley CEO. Frank Dupree is a pen name

In the late 1990s, the rise of the browser was supposed to usher in an era of unprecedented opportunity for startups. A great part of that increased opportunity came as a result of the significant reduction in platform dependencies. No longer did the users’ operating system dictate their access to services or information. Even a behemoth like Microsoft was fighting hand-to-hand combat with small startups for the first time in decades. Fast forward ten years, and it’s 1985 all over again.

But even as the risks of dependencies become better understood by startups and investors, the ascent of Facebook and Twitter seem to point to an ever increasing number of startups with significant business dependencies. Recent changes to both Facebook and Twitter show that neither startups nor their investors can assume much when it comes to support for a given API in the future. Today, even the OS seems subject to dramatic shifts in record time. One only need look to Apple’s iOS to see how dramatic and unpredictable developments can change the landscape for startups, customers and investors.

Today, most startups build with significant external platform dependencies, whether it is Facebook, iOS, Google Apps or Twitter. There are a few types of dependencies. A simple distinction might be to call a dependency on a platform symbiotic or parasitic. Symbiotic dependencies are those for which both sides agree to terms of the dependency and for which both sides seem to derive a benefit. Developers on Facebook’s platform, for example. The most successful here being Zynga, which grew completely and—probably for the team and its investors—nervously within the Facebook ecosystem.

But some dependencies are parasitic. As such, the problem is considerably more sticky when a startup forms an unwelcome dependency. Consider Meebo’s initial products which violated IM network terms of service by “hacking” into the major IM networks. Meebo has had to re-invent itself as a website check-in and sharing platform and at considerable cost (the startup has just announced its most recent round of financing taking it to over $70M in total funding).

In fact, a great portion of the “aggregation” genre of startups have troubling dependencies on larger players who often consider their products either a violation of service terms or simply the next feature on the product roadmap. Take the social media aggregation tools like TweetDeck and Seesmic. It has become clear that even players like Twitter or Facebook who offer generous API access can inadvertently step on the toes of startups in its ecosystem with a new product release. For Seesmic, this appears to mean a third pivot for the startup. The company started as a video commenting platform for blogs, moved into the desktop client social aggregation business and with Twitter’s recent redesign jumped into the plugin (aka, longtail) and enterprise user space (see recent partnership with SalesForce.com and plugin announcements). So for early platforms like Twitter, players like Seesmic and TweetDeck exist in a grey space between symbiotic and parasitic for the platform.

Then there are the 100% parasitic players, including companies like Rapleaf. Rapleaf has a dubious reputation because it built its business on the aggressive and surreptitious collection of social network data and matched it to email addresses. Recently both Facebook and Linkedin threatened legal recourse unless the company ceased crawling and scraping their user data and expunged all existing data collected from their networks maintained on over 650 million email addresses. As a result, two weeks ago Rapleaf agreed to stop providing its customers with information from both networks. That can’t be good for business.

But it is likely even worse for the startups who had based much if not all of their products on data they were buying from Rapleaf, sort of a double dependency. Take Gist, Etacts and Rapportive. All three of these startups were dependent on Rapleaf to present social network information (photos, titles, updates, etc.) alongside emails, mostly Gmail. When their Rapleaf data stopped providing Facebook and Linkedin data, the startups were left only with what appeared to be that which they had cached prior to the cut-off this month. And so it may be no surprise that within just a couple of weeks of the Rapleaf changes Gist is reportedly in talks to sell itself to RIM and Etacts has announced its sale to SalesForce.com (rumored for $6 million). One wonders if the acquiring companies fully understood the dependencies these startups had to Rapleaf. (Prediction: Rapportive also will be forced to sell very soon).

There is an alternative to parasitic access to a platform, but it can be expensive. You can build your own data from scratch or get access to it through painstaking partnerships if it is critical to your business. You might not grow as fast as you otherwise would, but at least you can control your own destiny. Even for startups that are successful in building their business within a platform dependency, such as Zynga, one of the most important things they must do as they grow is to mitigate their dependency on the platform.

For startups and investors, however, the lure and benefits of developing on other’s platforms with or without permission may be too great to avoid. When it comes to acquiring those critical first users, it takes an Odysseian-level of cunning (or foolishness) to avoid the siren’s song of platforms like Facebook. Building on Facebook reduces both the cost of development and provides direct access to a massive user base. And what are the other options? Even if you put aside the costs of going it alone, a significant portion of startups will be faced with taking on significant dependencies for their success. How many mobile OSes can there be? Forget startups, after iOS and Android, even the future of big players like Microsoft, Nokia and Palm seems uncertain in the mobile OS space.

So in the future it will likely be that the most successful startups will be those which are best able to navigate the minefield of platform dependencies. And while the benefits of platforms like iOS, Facebook and Twitter are significant to reduce development costs and increase access to customers, one can’t help but lament the squashing of the promise we got with our first browsers: a world where startups and the behemoths of industry alike fought on more or less equal terms. But increasingly it is once again becoming a platform world. And the companies who control the platforms, control the profits.

Photo credit: Flickr/uub

Editor’s note: This is the third of a three-part guest post by venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners on “Social Networking: The Past, Present, And Future.” Read Part I and Part II first. This series is an adaptation of a recent talk Suster gave at the Caltech / MIT Enterprise Forum on “the future of social networking.” You can watch the video here , or you can scroll quickly through the Powerpoint slides embedded at the bottom of the post or here on DocStoc. Follow him on Twitter @msuster.

In my first post I talked about the history of social networking from 1985-2002 dominated by CompuServe, AOL & Yahoo! In the second post I explored the current era which covers Web 2.0 (blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook), Realtime (Twitter), and mobile (Foursquare). Is the game over? Have Facebook & Twitter won or is their another act? No prizes for guessing … there’s always a second (and third, and fourth, and fifth) act in technology.  So where is social networking headed next?  I make eight predictions below.

1. The Social Graph Will Become Portable

Right now our social graph (whom we are connected to and their key information like email addresses) is mostly held captive by Facebook.  There is growing pressure on Facebook to make this portable and they have made some progress on this front.  Ultimately I don’t believe users or society as a whole will accept a single company “locking in” our vital information.

Facebook will succumb to pressure and over time make this available to us to allow us more choice in being part of several social networks without having to spam all of our friends again.  I know in 2010 this doesn’t seem obvious to everybody but it’s my judgment.  Either they make our social graph portable or we’ll find other networks to join.  I predict this will come before the end of 2012.

2. We Will Form Around “True” Social Networks: Quora, HackerNews, Namesake, StockTwits

Since 2006 I have been lamenting what I see as “the Facebook problem” – they are trying to lump me into one big social network.  Nobody exists in one social network. I have the one with my friends where I want to talk about how wasted we were at the party last weekend that I don’t want to share with my family network where I share pictures of the kids with my parents and siblings.

I don’t want either of these mixed with the business social network in which I want to maintain the appearance that I’m “all business” and certainly don’t want to see college pictures of me in Mexico floating around. I don’t want to mix my “public network” with my “private networks.”  Facebook has jumbled these all together and then tried to bandage it by making groups available.  I don’t think this really solves the problem.

And young people aren’t stupid – they certainly aren’t as digitally naïve as their elders like to think.  To get around all of this jumbling of social graphs they simply create multiple Facebook accounts under pseudonyms or “nom du guerre” for their real discussions and more pristine Facebook accounts for their real names. I wonder how many of Facebook’s 500 million users are created for this purpose?  I’ve confirmed this trend with several young people.

I believe that people already form topical social networks as evidenced in places like HackerNews or Quora.  We are also seeing the growth of social networks around topics of interest like StockTwits for people interested in investing in the stock market.  There are new networks forming to try and address the needs of specific social networks such as Namesake that is in its experimental stage but sees a world in which people want to network outside of Facebook.

3. Privacy Issues Will Continue to Cause Problems: Diaspora

Facebook made a deal with us that our social network was private.  When they jealously watched the rise of Twitter they decided that it should be made more public, but that wasn’t the bargain we made when we signed up in the first place.  If I were Facebook I would have simply created two places where you could network, Facebook “private” and Facebook “open.”  The latter product could have competed directly with Twitter and could have had an asymmetric follow model.

Sure, we would have had to choose which followers to have in that separate timeline and they wouldn’t have gotten all the synergies that they have by just lumping them together.  But if they would have done it this way they never would have crossed the ethical lines that they did and we could all just love Facebook instead of our love-hate relationships.  I’m still there daily to see pictures of my nieces & nephews – but I never connect more broadly with anybody in the business community.  So 95% of my social networking time goes to Twitter.

I know most people aren’t troubled by the loosening of their information – but I believe that’s because most people don’t understand it.

What I realized in working with so many startup technology firms is that even if you don’t give permission to third-party apps to access your information much of it is available anyways as long as somebody you’re connected to is more promiscuous with third-party apps.  Also, all of those “Facebook Connect” buttons on websites are awesome for quickly logging in, but each gives those websites unprecedented access to your personal information.

I believe that privacy leaks will cause a longer-term backlash against misusing our information but in the short-term not enough people understand the consequences to be alarmed. Diaspora was created in direct response to the growing concerns about Facebook privacy and lock-in.  Whether or not Diaspora will take off is anybody’s guess.  But a lot of people would love to see them or similar players emerge.

4. Social Networking Will Become Pervasive: Facebook Connect meets Pandora, NYTimes

As our social graph becomes more portable I believe that social networking will become a feature in everything we do.  You can already see it slipping into services like Pandora where my social graph instantly appears and my friends’ musical tastes are displayed without my knowing this would happen.  On NY Times I’m getting recommended articles by friends and I didn’t explicitly turn this feature on.  This trend of social pervasiveness will continue.

5. Third-Party Tools Will Embed Social Features in Websites: Meebo

One thing that is obvious to me is that while many websites want to have Facebook Connect log-ins to know more about you, they don’t really know what to do with you once they have that information.  They’re mostly now thinking about serving demographically targeted ads to you, but that’s not very interesting.  Third-party software companies will start to offer features to websites to actually drive social features.  This will take a few years but players such as Meebo are already innovating in this category though their toolbar.

6. Social Networking (like the web) Will Split Into Layers: SimpleGeo, PlaceIQ

One of the most interesting trends in the last few years has been watching the Internet split into layers.  At the bottom end of the stack is storage (S3) and processing (EC2).  At the top end is the business logic created by startups and established technology companies.  I’m going to write a whole post on BothSid.es in the next few weeks on the layering of the Internet and the most important layer that will emerge in the next few years.  We know that the layering of the PC era led to huge innovation at each layer in the stack and I expect the same to continue to emerge on the Internet.  But for now suffice it to say that we’re already seeing this happen in social networks.

One interesting layer is the “mapping layer” that is emerging in mobile social networks.  If every startup had to figure out the locations of every business, what type of business they were and where they were located on a map we’d have very few startups.  SimpleGeo is designed with the idea that startups can create new mobile products without having to each build their own mapping functionality.  This is an awesome trend and will further lower the cost of startup development.  I predict that SimpleGeo will do well in the mapping layer but I see more innovative companies emerging at the data layer.

And there are other companies racing to create horizontal platforms.  One I saw recently was PlaceIQ.  Their goal is to create a horizontal platform that allows marketers or developers to know a lot more about the geo-locations and not just the specific businesses / points-of-interest.  They’re capturing information about the demographics of map tiles, levels of LBS activity, what certain zones are known for (i.e. romantic spot, financial district) and want to make this available to others.

7. Social Chaos Will Create New Business Opportunities: Klout, Sprout Social, CoTweet, awe.sm, (next gen) Buzzd

The explosion of data is creating opportunities just in the management of the data in and of itself.  Once we’re uber-connected and getting information online from people we’ve only met online we need to know more about the “authority” of the people we’re following.  Enter Klout, a service that tracks the influence of individuals in social networks.  It can be imported into other products (e.g. StockTwits) where you really want to know more about the person giving you advice.

We know that Twitter is leading to customer service opportunities for businesses but the opposite is also true.  If you don’t manage what is said about you in social networks it could be detrimental.  Products such as Sprout Social and CoTweet are emerging to help businesses better track and communicate with their customers and leads.  Products like awe.sm (I’m an investor) will help you manage the efficacy of your social media marketing campaigns.

And one of the cooler new products that will emerge in 2011 is being created by Nihal Mehta, who has pivoted from his previous company Buzzd, but I’m sworn to secrecy on what he’s up to until he releases it publicly.  I saw the product recently in New York and loved it.  It will address the world of what happens when businesses and consumers are increasingly mobile & social.

8. Facebook Will Not be the Only Dominant Player

I know that in 2010 it seems ridiculous to say anything other than “Facebook has won—the war is over” and I know that it feels that way right now.  Facebook is so dominant it is astounding.  In a complete return to where we all began with AOL—the world is “closed” again as Facebook has become this generation’s walled garden.  When you’re on Facebook you’re not on the Internet—you’re on the InterNOT.  It is an amazing service and I use it regularly myself (although much less than I use Twitter).  But it makes me laugh to now see so many brands advertising their “fan pages” as they did their AOL Keywords back in the day.  Plus ça change …

Well, here’s a quick history primer that may change your mind:

• In 1998 the Department of Justice launched an anti-trust case against Microsoft.  People feared they were going to have a monopoly over the Internet due to “bunding” Internet Explorer with their operating system.  A bit laughable in 2010, just 12 years later.  These days people would sooner fear Apple than Microsoft, proving that reality is stranger than fiction.
• In April of 2000 there were fears that the AOL / Time Warner merger would create a monopoly on the Internet.  As you know, Time Warner eventually spun off AOL for peanuts.  AOL is in the process of rebuilding itself and emulating a little-known LA-based startup called Demand Media.  AOL seems to be doing great things to reinvent itself under the leadership of Tim Armstrong, but monopoly? Never.
• In May 2007 there were fears that Google was becoming a monopoly.  It controlled two-thirds of all Internet searches in the US and as we all knew—search was inevitably going to be the portal to finding information on the Internet.  Or was it?  We now know that social networking is having a profound impact on how we discover and share content online.
• So . . . now it is November 2010 and Facebook has more than 500 million users.  They have more page views than even Google.  More than 10% of all time on the web is now Facebook.  They have become a juggernaut in online advertising, pictures, video and online games.  And now they want to revolutionize email.  It is no doubt that the next decade belongs to Facebook. But the coincidence is that 10 years out will be 2020 and when we look back from that date I’m certain that people will also find a Facebook monopoly a bit laughable.

Now that people are just starting to get comfortable with the concept of the check-in for geo-location, it is starting to spread to other areas like product check-ins, TV show check-ins, and website check-ins. Just a couple weeks ago, Meebo introduced website check-ins as a new feature for its Meebo Bar. And before that, at our last Disrupt conference in San Francisco, two of the startups (Badgeville and OneTrueFan) launched entire companies around the concept of the website check-in.

So why would you ever want to check into a website? I ran into Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg today at SAI’s Ignition conference in New York City, who explains in the video above. The Meebo Bar is an IM and sharing extension that increasingly is appearing on many Websites. Meebo is now testing the concept of website check-ins, where you can check into any site you are on by clicking a button and sharing that on Facebook or Twitter. This is not the same as sharing a specific link, although it supports that as well. It is more just telling everyone you know that you like a certain site and it acts as an implicit endorsement. As a result, you will be able to find new sites through people, kind of like you can with StumbleUpon. A check-in in this respect is very similar to a Stumble.

People who check in the most become “VIPs,” with the idea that individual publishers could then reward their most loyal visitors with recognition or extra perks. You can sign up for the alpha version of the Meebo extension here (for Firefox and Chrome only) to check out the check-in feature.

Better than a box? A bar. No, not one with hotties and booze– a toolbar.

In part two of our interview with Meebo’s co-founder and CEO Seth Sternberg, we talk about the value of reach online– given the gargantuan reach companies can get on platforms like Facebook in no time. Like a diamond, if everyone can get it, it’s no longer as valuable. Sternberg pokes a big hole into one of the hottest storylines of the early Web 2.0 days– that you could build a big business off of widgets.

Reach only matters if you can make money off of it. To that end, Sternberg gives some sexy revenue details: Meebo ads boast 1% click-rates (compared to .1% for the industry) and on average people watch the ad for sixty seconds.

Wait. Really? That sounds a lot like that hackneyed claim that people love advertising as long as it’s well done. I asked Sternberg who on earth is sitting around watching these ads while the rest of us ignore banners and groan at floating ads. (CC: AOL)

The key, he says, is advertising to people not at the moment when they want something else, but when they have a moment of boredom. Yep. Pre-rolls suck as badly as widgets.

Video below.

Seth Sternberg, Meebo co-founder and CEO, stopped by our studio after Web 2.0 to tell us about how the site became so much more than Web-based IM and how he says the company is nailing the discovery problem in a new, more powerful way than Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and everyone that came before.

They reach 180 million uniques world-wide every month. How’d they get there? Moving from a product the founders wanted to build to a product other sites and users wanted them to build, and an emphasis on “building a product for normal people, not Silicon Valley.”

Sternberg explains what he means in the video below. Tomorrow, we’ll be posting part two of our interview with Sternberg where we talk about the value (declining value) of “reach” in an age of huge platforms with instant distribution. I also pry a few revenue details out of Sternberg. You won’t want to miss it.

With the rise of Foursquare, the “check-in” has become fairly commonplace. With the launch of Places, Facebook will only make it more so. It shouldn’t be surprising that we’re seeing dozens of other startups spring up to do check-ins for FILL-IN-THE-BLANK. Media check-ins were a pretty obvious extension. But now we’re seeing a number of companies pop up that are doing check-ins for websites. A couple of these, Badgeville and OneTrueFan, launched in September at TechCrunch Disrupt. Now they’re about to get some very big competition: Meebo.

Specifically, on Tuesday, Meebo is launching a new browser extension, the Meebo MiniBar, in alpha. This extension, which will be available for Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, will allow people to check-in to the websites they’re browsing on the fly. And this extension is just the first step. Once it’s fully up and running, Meebo plans to add the functionality to their popular toolbar. A toolbar which spans some 8,000 partner websites and reaches 180 million unique users a month already.

So why is Meebo getting into this game? “I kind of think sharing is a little bit tapped out,” Meebo Co-founder and CEO Seth Sternberg told us when we sat down with him last week to get a preview of the new feature. He notes that plenty of people are getting hesitant to share things on Facebook and Twitter because they’re afraid someone else already has and they’ll be considered uncool or out of date. There’s a real anxiety there. So instead, he hopes this Meebo MiniBar (and eventually the Meebo Bar itself) removes this sharing stigma. You should be able to show off what you’re really reading around on the web and not worry if someone else has already shared it.

Sternberg also notes that user testing has told them that a lot of people are interested to know what websites their friends are actually visiting. “My friends know about cooler websites than I do,” is how he puts it. And he says that Twitter today seems to be more about rap stars, while Facebook is for your actual friends, but not necessarily for content discovery amongst your friends.

Having said that, obviously the Meebo MiniBar will have options to share your check-ins to Twitter and Facebook. But Sternberg is quick to say that this won’t be on by default. Instead, the more interesting discovery mechanism may exist in the extension itself, as there is a Feed button that shows you when friends discover and check-in to new sites.

When you check-in to a site with the Meebo MiniBar, you’ll check into the site itself, not a specific page (even if you’re on one). So if you were to check-in while reading this article, for example, you would check-in to TechCrunch. You will be able to add a specific page though by clicking the “Attach this page” button after you check-in. But that’s optional. As is commenting.

This basic approach seems like a smart play. It reminds me a bit of MyBlogLog before their acquisition by Yahoo. Of course on big difference is that the Meebo MiniBar won’t show that you’ve visited a site unless you explicitly check-in.

By checking-in to sites you love enough, you can also earn VIP status. But Sternberg wants to make it clear that this isn’t about creating a game mechanic — there is no mayor system, like on Foursquare or some of the site check-in rivals mentioned above. This VIP system is just a way to show your affinity towards certain sites you actually visit. And eventually, this VIP status could be used by the site itself to rewards its most loyal readers.

But those type of partner discussions and potential APIs are down the road. For now, Meebo just wants to get an alpha version of the product out there, and that’s why they made the MiniBar. Sternberg notes that it’s one of the few extensions that doesn’t install any software on your system — everything loaded comes from Meebo.com itself. Their work with the Meebo Bar has allowed them to create this type of micro-footprint tool. And Sternberg says that the experience will still be instantaneous. You visit a site, you hit the check-in button, and you’re done.

And this MiniBar still offers much of the functionality of the larger bar. For example, you can chat with your online friends from across the web in it.

Another new feature Meebo is launching to facilitate all of this are Meebo profile pages. This keeps track of your check-in activity across the web. This also allows you to visit other websites and see what other users have been there.

Again, look for the extension to launch on Tuesday. And be sure to check-in to TechCrunch.

This is Bebo’s first step towards a much more real-time, interactive platform since they sold to AOL for $850 million in 2008. Right after that AOL let the platform languish, eventually shutting it down for tax purposes and selling it for about $10m to Criterion Capital Partners. True story.

The new team of 20 or so employees has – surprise surprise – made the site profitable and it’s now coming back in user numbers. Mike Arrington’s recent interview with CTO Akash Garg suggested they’d be going for “Self expression, mobile and video will be strong components.” Clearly IM and Meebo is part of that.

Watch out Meebo, there’s a new kid on the block. Israeli startup Wibiya, which publicly launched its web-based, customizable toolbar to publishers in January of this year, is seeing impressive traffic for a year-old company.

According to Quantcast, Wibiya is seeing 151 million monthly visitors to its toolbars. In contrast, Quantcast also reports that Meebo is currently seeing 143 million monthly visitors. Currently, Wibiya has more than 70,000 active websites using its toolbar, including TheStreet, TheOnion, Playboy, Philly.com, JellyBelly.com and more. Wibiya says that nearly 1000 new websites are adding the toolbar per day.

Wibiya’s toolbar for blogs and publishers integrates services from social media sites, applications and widgets. Everything is customizable, giving publishers the ability to add Facebook Connect, enabling Twitter alerts, and tap into chat app TinyChat fairly easily. The toolbar has a fairly in-depth integration with Twitter, featuring search, latest Tweets, Tweets about each page and more. Publishers can also bring their Facebook Fan Page stream to the toolbar. Wibiya also has an “app store” of sorts, where publishers can customize their bars with a variety of apps, including Google Translate, YouTube, Cooliris’s 3D video galleries, games and more.

In the future, Wibiya plans to roll out an API to developers, allowing others to integrate their own applications onto the Wibiya platform and track their application’s performance.

Of course, Meebo is seeing steady growth as well, and they are much better known. But it should be interesting to see how Facebook’s planned social bar, which was announced this year at the social network’s developer conference, will effect the growth of both Meebo and Wibiya.

Facebook’s new bar will apparently allow third party sites to quickly integrate a ‘Like’ button and Facebook Chat. But the details are still unclear as to how customizable Facebook’s social bar will be, and if it will include support for Twitter, email, MySpace and other media platforms. Meebo and Wibiya could stand out as more flexible alternatives to publishers if the social network’s new toolbar is too Facebook-centric.

To most people, online chat service Meebo is best known for its multiprotocol webchat, but for over a year now its primary focus has been the Meebo Bar — a persistent toolbar that third party websites can embed on their pages to facilitate sharing through services like Facebook, Twitter, and email. That bar now reaches nearly 150 million people per month through dozens of large third party integrations. Last week CEO Seth Sternberg swung by TechCrunch headquarters to discuss the current status of the Bar, and how it’s turning a single ad unit into some serious revenue.

We last did a deep dive on the progress of the Meebo Bar in December, when Quantcast figures showed it reaching nearly 100 million unique visitors across Meebo partner sites. That number on Quantcast is now up to nearly 150 million, and since August, comScore says that Meebo’s uniques are up nearly 300%. In terms of functionality the Meebo Bar hasn’t changed much since I last spoke to Sternberg, but the amount of money it pulls in certainly has: Sternberg says that the Bar is doing 4x revenue growth year over year, and that revenue is 4x right now what it was in January. In other words, things are picking up quickly (though it’s worth pointing out that Meebo declined to share any concrete revenue figures).

The monetization effort is built around a single, interactive ad unit on the left side of the Meebo Bar that performs unusually well, with users clicking on the ad on over 1% of impressions. When a user clicks on the ad, an interactive, rich media overlay appears on the screen. Here, too, Meebo sees very strong engagement: once activated, the average time spent with one of these ads is 50-60 seconds. In light of its success, Meebo has built out a sales team dedicated to this one ad unit. The company has grown to 115 employees (up from 70 in December), with much of the growth in direct sales and brands.

Along with the new growth stats, Sternberg also shared that Meebo has recently rewritten its social bar to address the slowdown issues commonly associated with third party plugins. Sternberg explains that many large publishers find that the third party plugins they integrate to boost functionality and sharing have the unwanted side effect of slowing down load times (the more plugins you have, the slower you get). The new version of the Meebo Bar, which will be rolling out of the course of the next week, has had its download size reduced by over 50% (it’s now under 100K), with pings of less than 10ms.

A New Challenger Approaches

Up until now, the Meebo Bar hasn’t had too much serious competition. Sure, some larger publishers have created their own bars, and there are certainly other third party alternatives, but Meebo has cemented its position as the web’s most popular social toolbar. The landscape may change soon, though: at f8 Facebook announced plans to launch its own social bar, which will allow third party sites to quickly integrate a ‘Like’ button and Facebook Chat.

Sternberg says that Facebook and Meebo will definitely be jockeying for the same screen real-estate on  third party sites, but he thinks that it can beat Facebook on openness. He explains that Meebo’s Bar has support for a broad number of networks like MSN, MySpace, Twitter, and email; Facebook may well only offer Facebook (and probably email) integration. He also points out that Meebo’s bar is more customizable, so publishers can integrate their own applications or Twitter streams.

And his points probably aren’t just spin. Given the ubiquity of Facebook and the rapid adoption of its ‘Like’ buttons, there’s no doubt that Facebook will pose a serious challenge to Meebo. But publishers don’t stand to gain from giving Facebook so much power over their traffic and user experience, either, so they may well turn to the more flexible alternative. Then again, Facebook may have a way to offer engaging social features in its toolbar that its competitors can’t, which would make the situation all the more interesting.

We’ll have to wait until Facebook’s social bar is actually released to find out — despite a preview nearly three months ago at f8, it’s still nowhere to be seen.