Skype has been in the news a lot lately. Over the past six months, rumors swirled that the peer-to-peer telephony service provider was going to be bought back from eBay by its original founders, to be spun off as a separate company and then IPO, and ultimately to be sold to an investor group (which was confirmed at the beginning of this month). Now Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis… → Read More
The idea of adding a social network to any site is a compelling one. Currently, most sites do this by creating their own networks using service like Facebook Groups and Ning. But those obviously aren’t actually your own site, they are other sites set up under your site’s name. Stribe’s goal is to move the network back onto your site.
The service, opening to the public today at Techcrunch50… → Read More
There’s a lot of live video streaming competition out there right now, but Justin.tv remains the biggest. And it’s looking to hold that lead with a redesign launching today, along with some new features.
The new site has an overall cleaner and simplified look. And simplification is the key to another big change: The addition of big front page broadcaster. When you first load up the site you will… → Read More
How do you advertise on a Web-based instant messaging service without interrupting conversations and annoying the hell out of users? Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg thinks he has the answer: “There is a moment of boredom while they are waiting for a response, that is when they click on ads.” He’s observed this based on how people interact with the ads which began appearing on Meebo.com last March. … → Read More
Over the last year or so, having online chat integrated into a website has quickly moved from “nifty” to “the norm”. The feature first caught on with Facebook, and has since made its way to a variety of other sites, including MySpace and Orkut. But most publishers and social networks don’t really have the resources to build their own chat clients, which can frustrate users that have become… → Read More
Is Meebo moving into email? The web-based chat service already centralizes instant messages from AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk, Facebook, MySpace, and more. Folding in emails from different accounts across the Web is a logical next step. In fact, Meebo already tiptoed into the email arena this morning with a new feature which appeared in its Windows desktop notifier.
A new “Mail” tab can now be… → Read More
The Netherlands-based eBuddy, which markets a comprehensive application that lets users handle multiple instant messaging accounts from the web or their mobile phones, is today releasing an application for the Android platform a couple months after Meebo made its similar product available on there (November 2008).
The eBuddy application for Google’s open mobile OS is now available for free on the… → Read More
Meebo‘s Community IM is getting its biggest vote of confidence yet tonight, when it is deployed on popular social network myYearbook. Community IM is Meebo’s answer to Facebook Chat, offering publishers and social networks a way to introduce a persistent chat bar at the bottom of their sites without having to develop one on their own. And while Meebo had deployed the product to 25 partner… → Read More
Web chat service Meebo, always innovative with advertising, is trying out something fairly aggressive: full takeover ads that show a persistent advertisement in the background.
The company says that they already got 1% or higher click throughs on existing ads units on the site, which included rollovers at the bottom of the screen and another unit right in the middle. But the new units actually… → Read More
Meebo, a popular web-based chat service, has announced that it is going to extend its successful advertising platform to include the growing number of partners that are deploying its Community IM product, which launched last year.
Last summer Meebo launched interactive social ads on its main chat portal at meebo.com, presenting users with small icons at the bottom of their chat windows that… → Read More
Last week Meebo and Facebook teamed to launch the first integration of Facebook Connect + Chat, allowing Meebo users to chat with their Facebook friends from the popular web-based IM service. The feature has had a rocky history: Meebo used an unsanctioned method to integrate Facebook Chat in December, then temporarily disabled it at Facebook’s request. And while many were quick to point the… → Read More
With all the talk about Meebo adding support for Facebook chat yesterday, I took notice of a message in our tips inbox today about another instant messaging aggregator service that I’d never heard of before adding support for Skype chat. IMO.IM is its name, it’s still in alpha stage (whatever that means), and it’s actually pretty neat.
First, the good. IMO.IM is simple, web-based service that… → Read More
Meebo’s Community IM, which effectively offers websites a Facebook Chat-like messaging platform “in a box”, looks like it’s finally ready for the masses. The product was first unveiled last July, and has announced partnerships with over a dozen sites including Sugar Publishing, AddictingGames, and myYearbook. But until now it has been rolled out slowly, and is currently live on only three… → Read More
Last month meebo, the web-based chat startup that supports nearly every IM protocol, announced that it had added support for both MySpace and Facebook Chat. Meebo’s post on the new features was a little strange – while they explicitly thanked “the folks at MySpace who encouraged and helped us to test and gave us their support”, there was no such mention of any support from Facebook’s side… → Read More
Last night we released the finalist names for the Crunchies Awards. Vote here for who you think should win. We’ve set up a site that is pretty self-explanatory, with all of the names of each finalist for every category, along with links to their Websites and Crunchbase profiles where you can learn more about each one before voting. The Crunchies represents the best the Web had to offer in 2008… → Read More
MySpace and Facebook may be frenemies forever, but now they have a new mutual friend that will pass notes between them. Meebo, the Web-based IM service, now supports IM accounts from both social networks. That means you can enter your Facebook and MySpace account IDs into Meebo and the chat with friends from both social networks in one IM box. The integration will work on Meebo.com itself, as… → Read More
It was only a few days ago that we tore into the 20 dollar IM+ application for being overpriced, buggy, and lacking anything that justified that 20 dollar price tag. At the tail-end of that review, we expressed our hopes that an IM app done right would come along soon. Enter Meebo for Android, brought to you by the same people behind the awesome browser-based IM application of the same name. → Read More
If you think there is too much noise about the U.S. election now, wait until next week. On Election Day, not only will every media outlet be covering the vote, but so will voters themselves who will have ample opportunity to Tweet, Digg, video, and IM the vote.
Most of these “reports” will probably consist of people telling the world that “I’m voting!” or who they just cast their vote for. Who… → Read More
We just received word that tonight at 9pm PT Flixster will roll out its integration of Meebo Community IM, which adds instant messaging-like chat functionality to any website.
Out of 19 total launch partners, a couple more will push their implementations live over the next two weeks, then a large batch of partners will launch theirs in early 2009. We don’t have any word yet on which partners… → Read More
Meebo has disclosed that 11 more sites have committed themselves to integrating Community IM, its forthcoming out-of-the-box service that adds Facebook Chat-like instant messaging capabilities to the bottom of any website.
The newest enlistements include Bleacher Report, Dhingana, Fanpop, GlobalGrind, IBeatYou, OrangeShark, PerfSpot, UGAME.net, Yaari, Zinch, and Zorpia. These join a set of… → Read More
Instant messaging service Meebo has given us a demo of its upcoming “Community IM” platform, which allows websites to seamlessly integrate a browser-based chat window very similar to Facebook Chat.
Meebo announced the upcoming community chat feature last July, with initial partners including DanceJam, myYearbook, AddictingGames, Sugar Publishing and Tagged. Flixster will be the first partner… → Read More
LiveWorld is a publicly traded company that’s been around since 1996 and is best known for its white labeled social networks. These are online communities that LiveWorld helps clients build up around their existing brands, and they often take a good deal more time and effort to set up than communities created on top of self-service platforms like Ning or KickApps.
However, LiveWorld is making a… → Read More
Instant messaging service Meebo announced a new product tonight called community Instant Messaging that will effectively provide “instant messaging in a box” to any site with a community. It will be a federated system, which means users can access friends on other meebo powered social networks, too. DanceJam, Flixster, myYearbook, Nickelodeon/MTVN Kids and Family Group’s… → Read More
Skype is getting a major, much-needed upgrade: Skype 4.0. President Josh Silverman calls it the “biggest new release in Skype’s history.” The new software client, which which will be released here in beta tomorrow (for Windows only), takes up the whole screen. Video is front and center. “Our old UI was purpose-built for voice ,” Silverman tells me. (I put an excerpt from… → Read More
Update on our post from earlier today – Meebo is now confirming that they have raised a $25 million third round of financing from Jafco Ventures, Time Warner Investments and KTB Ventures. Previous investors Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson also participated. Meebo was looking for a buyer through their investment bank, Montgomery & Co., but moved to a fundraising round earlier this… → Read More
Web chat startup Meebo has closed the funding round they’ve been working on with investment bank Montgomery & Co., a source tells us. Expect an announcement shortly. The best information we’ve been able to gather says the company raised $25 million or so on a $200 million valuation. Earlier this month they abandoned efforts to sell the company, focusing instead on raising money. → Read More
Web chat startup Meebo has been working with investment bank Montgomery & Co. for the last few months to either find a buyer or raise a big new round of financing. The rumor was they were looking for a $250 million valuation. A couple of sources have told us that eBay, Fox/MySpace and AOL all took a long look at the company, but ultimately passed based on the price and the fact that the… → Read More
AOL is pushing their two year old OpenAim initiative much further this morning with OpenAIM 2.0. There are three key changes of note. First they are now embracing services that they previously tried to stop – multiheaded clients and websites that allow users to access all of the major instant messaging platforms in one place. These are desktop services like Pidgin (open source), Adium (Mac)… → Read More
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