Today, Web-based IM and chat room provider Meebo is releasing full-fledged APIs for its Meebo Rooms that will allow Websites to embed chat functionality in an automated fashion. Currently, Meebo Rooms can be embedded on sites or blogs manually by pasting in the appropriate code, which has already led to a proliferation of such widgets. There are more than 200,000 Meebo Rooms, attracting millions of visitors a month. (See our previous coverage here and here). Explains Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg: Now, the servers of our partners can say, “I want to create a room.” It automates the creation process on a server-to-server basis. Also, we will be putting advertising into these rooms. In addition to the APIs, the company is also announcing the Meebo Network, which will serve ads inside Meebo Rooms across the Web, splitting the revenues with the Websites hosting the rooms. Since each Meebo Room is formed around a particular interest, ads can be targeted. And to the extent that sites participating in the network have demographic data on their members, that can be used for ad targeting as well. Only Meebo Rooms created through the API will show ads, not the ones created manually. The launch partners joining the Meebo Network are Piczo, Revision3, RockYou, Social Project, and Tagged. Revision3, for instance, will create a Meebo room on its site where fans can watch a synchronized loop of Web TV shows while chatting. Access to the full APIs and the ad network is by invitation only at this point. Social networks could use the new APIs to automatically add chat rooms to every group page. Rock bands or movie sites could add Meebo Rooms to their sites for visiting fans. Comparisons can be made here to Userplane, a white-label chat service which was bought by AOL in 2006 and powers many of the chat rooms on MySpace. But there are subtle differences. Most notable is the fact that Meebo Rooms can spread anywhere on the Web. Anyone can grab the embed code and put it on their blog or MySpace page as I’ve done below. Notes Sternberg: A user cannot take a room off of MySpace and throw it somewhere else. We have all our rooms networked. A user can take the CBS Jericho room, and throw it on their WordPress blog. Our chat rooms are networked versus islands within Websites. It is very hard to → Read More
Casual gaming startup PlayFirst has secured $16.5 million Series C in a round led by DCM that included original investors Mayfield Fund, Trinity Ventures and Rustic Canyon Partners. The new round brings total funding for PlayFirst to $26.5 million. San Francisco based PlayFirst was founded in 2004 and is focused on creating “shared casual game experiences around lasting original brands” that includes game play “rich in story and character.” PlayFirst titles include Wedding Dash, Chocolatier, and Dream Chronicles. Accompanying news of the funding was a new deal between PlayFirst and RockYou. Under the deal RockYou will distribute PlayFirst games through its widget and social networking service, with Wedding Dash the first title to be made available to Facebook users. PlayFirst sees the deal a way of tapping into the growing popularity of social networking sites as a gaming platform. According to PlayFirst, Wedding Dash has so far been downloaded 200 million times by users on PC, Mac, mobile and handheld platforms. CrunchBase Information PlayFirst RockYou Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
It didn’t take long for someone to hack the first OpenSocial application. In fact, it took just 45 minutes. A developer who goes by the alias “theharmonyguy” and describes himself as “just an amateur” claims to have compromised the RockYou OpenSocial application on Plaxo called emote (see the Plaxo blog for details on the application). Specifically, he claims to have added a number of emoticons to Plaxo VP Marketing John McCrea’s profile within 45 minutes of it launching. In an email, McCrea said he added all of the emoticons himself and his account doesn’t appear to be hacked. But when I asked theharmonyguy to hack my Plaxo account he did, within minutes, adding four quick emoticon messages such as “michael arrington is getting my bling on” and “michael arrington is w00t” (see image to left, none of those were added by me). theharmoneyguy then added one more to McCrea’s account, which will be difficult for him to deny: theharmonyguy also pointed out specific problems with RockYou’s code, including some fairly humorous comments: Some interesting code in there. For one, the app still doesn’t seem to be live for most of us (John McCrea from Plaxo has used it somehow) – it currently loads a “Please wait” iframe that never changes. But check out these code comments: // TODO: no error checking – we’re bold… // TODO: figure out why this is necessary??? Also, the code constantly branches between Plaxo and “default,” which appears to be Orkut. In fact, there are some hardcoded names that I bet showed up in some OpenSocial screenshots somewhere: if (getContainerType() == “orkut”) { friendIds[iNumFriends] = “11285577331363942034″; friendNames[iNumFriends] = “Raymond Chan”; iNumFriends = iNumFriends + 1; friendIds[iNumFriends] = “15479081059638046412″; friendNames[iNumFriends] = “Jia Shen”; iNumFriends = iNumFriends + 1; } theharmonyguy says he’s successfully hacked Facebook applications too, including the Superpoke app, but that it is more difficult: Facebook apps are not quite this easy. The main issue I’ve found with Facebook apps is being able to access people’s app-related history; for instance, until recently, I could access the SuperPoke action feed for any user. (I could also SuperPoke any user; not sure if they’ve fixed that one. Finally, I can access all the SuperPoke actions – they haven’t fixed that one, but it’s more just for fun.) There are other apps where, last I checked, that was still an issue ( e.g. viewing anyone’s Graffiti posts). → Read More
So Facebook will finally allow users to group friends and control information flow based on friend type. For guys like Robert Scoble, who have 5,000 friends (the limit), this may be a way to finally sort through the real friends from the fans. It’s a much needed feature that people have been requesting for a long time. It also shows the steady maturity of Facebook from a college network to a full on world network, where friendships, business contacts, family and other types of relationships need to be more fully described. And this is also as much about privacy as it is about organization – users will be able to limit the information that certain friend groups receive. A few existing applications are going to be affected, like Slide’s Top Friends application, the most popular third party app on Facebook. Lots of other applications will likely need to be tweaked to work properly when this launches (so many of them access the friends list). And this will shut down at least one “startup” we’ve been tracking that was creating this exact feature as an application. At least they can quit now and stop putting good time and money after bad. Building Facebook applications is a big dice roll. If it’s too popular or too obvious of an idea (even if it hasn’t been done yet), Facebook is just as likely to compete with you as pay a few bucks and just buy you (they are probably more likely to compete with you than buy you, actually). Some developers will probably wonder if getting a cash grant from Facebook’s just-announced fbFund will lessen the likelihood of direct competition from the company. Only time will tell. Update: Wired is writing about a slew of Facebook ad networks and the almost inevitable fact that Facebook will be competing with them directly, too. We’ve covered most of these: SocialMedia, VideoEgg, Lookery, fbExchange, and RockYou. Also mentioned are Cubics and Appfuel. Lots of brave souls racing to build a business before Facebook comes in and stomps all over the scene. → Read More
People aren’t wasting any time trying to figure out how to monetize all those thousands of Facebook apps that have sprung up over the last couple of months. At least three advertising experiments have launched – the most promising, by far, is RockYou. fbExchange The first out the door was FBExchange, a copycat of the LinkExchange idea from the nineties. It was created by the 30Boxes Calendar team – Narendra Rocherolle, Julie Davidson and Nick Wilder. Display others’ ads on your facebook application and build up credits, which can then be used to run your own ads on other apps. It’s a cheap and easy way to get exposure for your application, should the viral Facebook machine not create enough growth to keep you happy. See GigaOm for more. The company says they’ve booked $200k in revenue after just two weeks live. Lookery Lookery, founded by serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer, is a straight up advertising network targeted solely at Facebook applications. They say they’ll have access to deep demographic data on users and can therefore target ads to users with very specific characteristics – a woman between the ages of 20-25 in New York, for example. That theoretically will lead to much higher advertising rates. I like the idea, but Facebook itself has access to the same data and more and has had trouble selling high CPM ads at scale. Lookery needs big scale to be successful, and so will likely struggle in the early days. For now, Rafer says, they are passing 100% of revenue to content providers and will start to take a cut in a month or so when the economics support it. RockYou RockYou has been quietly testing their own idea of an advertising network – selling “users” to other applications. They’ve had a tremendous amount of success building viral applications on Facebook so far. Their Super Wall app, for example, has nearly 3 million users and is adding hundreds of thousands of new users each day. It’s basically what it says – a better “wall” where friends can leave messages. With Super Wall, people can add pictures, video and other rich media. They’re offering to promote third party applications on Super Wall, and charging on a per-user-acquired (CPA) basis. When a user is signing up for Super Wall they are asked if they’d like to also add a additional application (the advertiser). See the screen → Read More
More details on the RockYou financing are leaking, although we still can’t get confirmation from the company or previous investors. A source close to the company says they raised $11 million in this second round at a $50 million post money valuation, most or all from European investor Partech. The company had previously raised $1.5 million from Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. We’re also hearing that Lightspeed and Sequoia participated pro rata. All outside data sources suggest RockYou is second to Slide, which raised a large round of financing late last year. However, an investor, Lightspeed partner Jeremy Liew, argues that RockYou is actually bigger than Slide in a comment to our previous post. → Read More
We’re getting reports from multiple sources (but no confirmation from the company yet) that photo widget company RockYou has raised a big round of financing. The unconfirmed numbers are $10+ million at a $50+ million valuation, which is in line with what competitor Slide raised late last year. The company had previously raised $1.5 million from Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Slide is the undisputed leader in this space in terms of usage, although PhotoBucket has the most recent Flash tools that allow slide shows containing video, photos and music (look for RockYou and Slide to launch these tools promptly as well). Recent competitor FilmLoop is in the TechCrunch DeadPool after their largest investor, ComVentures, threw them under a bus. RockYou was involved in a legal dispute last year over the ownership of the original intellectual property used to create the company. Update: Lightspeed Partner Jeremy Liew has a good comment below, and also see his blog post from last month discussing his thoughts on RockYou and other widget companies. → Read More
Today’s the day – SuperBowl XLI. Hundreds of millions of people around the world will eat junk food, drink beer, and watch the best television advertising all year interrupted periodically with a football game. Six startups (Meebo, Meez, Multiply, Plaxo, RockYou and Technorati) who can’t afford the $2.5 million plus for a thirty second spot during the game got together to produce low-budget “SuperBowl” ads and put them on YouTube. Some of them are pretty entertaining. Others, not so much. We’ve embedded all of them below and have a poll to see which one you like the best. By the way, last year’s real SuperBowl ads are still up on Google Video at video.google.com/superbowl.html. I assume Google will replace those ads with SuperBowl XLI ads tomorrow. Yahoo will also be hosting the actual SuperBowl ads once the games starts at Yahoo Video. My favorite “startup” ad is Technorati, although they cheated by using footage from one of my favorite movies. Plaxo and Meebo are tied for second place. The ads and poll are below, in this order: Meebo, Meez, Multiply, Plaxo, RockYou and Technorati: → Read More
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