Venturebeat ran a story on the property last May, citing sources and Userplane clients as saying the service had been “neglected if not abandoned by AOL”. Yet this morning, I exchanged some e-mails with Darin Ohlandt, General Manager of Userplane, and he responded to the rumors saying they are definitely not shutting down and will continue to offer the existing chat and IM services to third-party sites.

However, some writing on the wall suggests he may not be painting a complete picture of what is going on.

A recent thread on OnlinePersonalsWatch (which covers the online dating industry, where demand for Userplane and other similar services has always been high) suggested that the site would be deadpooled by its owner soon. A developer commented on the thread claiming he had tried to contact Userplane for weeks through e-mails, voice calls and social networks and received no response, and ultimately went to their offices only to find all doors were locked with no one in sight (Ohlandt suspects the latter may have had something to do with the move to a new office in Santa Monica). And in that very same thread, former senior developer at Userplane Nick Schneble touted his new startup TopicFox, an alternative to the service (although it seems to be offline now – the website now reads the service was discontinued over a conflict of interest with Userplane).

Meanwhile the Userplane website still lists Michael Jones as the company’s CEO. That’s remarkable, because Jones left the AOL executive team to pursue a new startup called Tsavo back in August 2008, and has since signed up as the new COO at MySpace.

A month ago, Time Warner announced that its Board of Directors has authorized management to proceed with plans for the separation of AOL from the company. This would likely result in a massive restructuring of AOL, and could have a major impact on non-proven acquisitions made in the past. Other reasons why Userplane is on deadpool alert: AOL is placing much focus on lifestreaming and chat service SocialThing, which recently spread across 75 of its properties, and then of course there’s those other instant messaging services in their portfolio (AIM and ICQ).

There are more signs. When Ted Cahall was named new president of the product group at AOL back in January 2009, his memo – which we published in full here on TechCrunch – states that Userplane would be moved into the People Networks business unit under former Bebo President Joanna Shields. But at the end of last month, Shields resigned from her position as Executive VP for People Networks and to our knowledge has not been replaced to date.

It’s not surprising that many startups with competing solutions are taking advantage of the rumors about Userplane’s impending shut-down. Toksta is the most outspoken one, having set up a special page for Userplane clients who are looking to switch to an alternative provider. Other competitors in the field who are likely paying a lot of attention to what is going to happen to Userplane include Meebo with its Community IM product and ekkoTV.

To be continued, no doubt.

Widget developer JS-Kit has joined with AOL’s Userplane in a widget cross-distribution partnership that should significantly increase the potential userbases for both companies.

Both companies produce popular sets of widgets that can be easily implemented with a minimal amount of code. Among Userplane’s offerings are a popular Webchat widget (which allows for full featured online chat), a media player, and an embeddable bulletin board. JS-Kit offers less media-centric widgets like Ratings, Comments, and Polls.

With the new partnership, these two companies will begin offering eachother’s widgets in the hopes of gaining further distribution. At first, Userplane will be offering the JS-Kit Ratings widget and JS-Kit will be offering the Userplane Webchat widget, with both companies splitting embedded advertising 50/50. In the future there are plans to include more of each company’s widgets in the deal.

JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux says that the partnership will expose his widgets to 300,000 potential new sites though Userplane’s distribution channels. The deal gives further credibility to the JS-Kit brand, which has recently been added to Brightcove 3 through its API and has scored a number of other large partnerships. Last week the company raised $3.6 million in Series B funding.

Userplane, the company behind Webchat and a number of other online communication services, has introduced a new video app dubbed “Mediaplayer”. The free white-label app will allow web publishers to add hosted video uploads to their sites under an ad-supported model.

Mediaplayer users will be able to upload videos as large as 100MB, and there is no limit on the amount of upload or streaming bandwidth they can consume. For the time being, all ad revenue from Mediaplayer will go to Userplane, but Michael Jones, the company’s CEO, says that they hope to introduce the revenue sharing model seen on their other apps in the near future. The current version of the app is restricted to video only, but the next release will feature Minichat, allowing users to chat while they watch clips.

Mediaplayer should see a significant boost in initial usage from ex-VideoEgg members. VideoEgg announced last March that it would be leaving the free video hosting space, and has named MediaPlayer as one of its recommended replacements.

Userplane was acquired by AOL in 2006 and, with more than 200,000 publishers, is one of the largest providers of online white-label services. For the time being their product will see competition from other video hosting sites including VSocial and KickApps, but with the eventual introduction of simultaneous chat they will also face off with Meeboand Videophlow, among others.

I interviewed Guy King from Stateless for the CushyCMS launch in April (the post includes a demo video) and he mentioned then that the long-term plan for CushyCMS was to offer a professional subscription version. King tells me that the demand for a professional version of CushyCMS was strong from the day the service launched, so they immediately started building it. As of last week, the free version of CushyCMS has more than 4,600 active users, a tidy number given this isn’t an every day consumer based product.

CushyCMS is a simple content management system that aims to make life easier for web designers by simplifying content management. Web designers use CushyCMS to give content editors (for example a client) access to part, full or many pages at a granular level (headings, images, sidebars, etc), enabling them to update or create standards-compliant content directly from a browser without messing with the sites coding.

CushyCMS Pro is being offered at $28/month and features branding support, including a custom logo, colors and domain (e.g. acmedesign.clienteditor.com). There is no set-up fee or minimum subscription length and both PayPal and AlertPay are accepted.

In addition, several new features have been added to the free version of CushyCMS, including SFTP support (secure FTP), Improved WYSIWYG editor and Support for IIS and other Microsoft-based FTP servers.

Former TechCrunch writer Duncan Riley edits The Inquisitr, a daily dose of tech, pop and penguins.

Mike Jones’ personal blog is here.

Companies facing a slowing economy are looking for more cost-effective ways to reach customers. Forrester’s recent post on the role of social media during economic recessions supports the idea that social media can help companies survive and thrive in tough economic times. And Josh Bernoff’s full report on the subject calls for an end to “toe-dipping” by interactive marketers and advises a more serious look at cost-effective and measurable social marketing programs. A key take away:

…since interactive marketing programs are now fueled by measurable results, not dot-com madness, we believe that they can thrive in a recession. Social applications in particular, such as communities and social networking sites, are cost-effective and have a measurable impact on prospects’ decisions in the consideration stage, which will be important to companies under recessionary pressures. Interactive marketers should stop toe-dipping and invest only in programs that can deliver on measurable metrics.

Additionally, Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang points out that social marketing costs far less than traditional marketing. So when purse strings are tightened, marketing execs will become more excited about social media’s potential of reaching exponentially more people with fewer dollars.

While the recession-proofness of social media is a case study in the making, the idea that social applications can thrive in tight economic times because they are a cost-effective, precise way for companies to interact with customers and prospective customers, is right on the money – quite literally.

Widgets: The Macro Promise of Micro-markets

The top widget providers are proving that widgets can be big business. Slide and Userplane, of which I’m CEO, are two successful providers of distributed applications. Slide’s recent $500M valuation gives credence to the huge potential of these small attention grabbers. The success of today’s widgets is largely a function of the hundreds of millions of ad views they garner each day.

In April 2007, comScore estimated that widgets reach 177M people every month, or 21% of the worldwide online audience. Currently, only a fraction of widget traffic – perhaps as little as 0.5% – is being monetized. And that 0.5% is being monetized most frequently through traditional CPM models. In order for widgets to pay off in the long term, however, new models are required that will drive revenue beyond the top few widget providers and generate significant returns for all customers investing ad dollars.

Brands are changing the way they view online advertising and are becoming more concerned about reaching audiences based on their interests and actions, through so-called behavioral targeting. Traditional brand affinity concerns are taking a back seat to a willingness to meet users on their own terms. And, it doesn’t stop there. Marketing will align with individual social graphs as well.

The idea of a brand’s squeaky-clean “image” appearing next to a porn star would have been cause for reprimand in the old school of media buying. Yet in online advertising, it seems to slide. The new model of advertising, which is focused on customer behavior, makes it not only okay but necessary to meet customers within their preferred areas of interest, or “micro-markets”.

Widget providers are gathering the kind of intelligence that allows for this sophisticated behavioral targeting. They can assure brands before investing ad dollars that particular users are interested in their product or service. If behavioral intelligence demonstrates that a particular consumer is effectively engaged by the brand in proximity to MySpace vampires with blood-coated fangs, the new breed of media buyers will be more willing to put their old placement fears aside.

The Changing Nature of the Media Buy

The convergence of behavioral intelligence, distributed advertising models, and micro-markets is helping to create a sweet spot for widgets. eMarketer predicts an increase in the behavioral targeting market to $3.8B by 2011 from $350M in 2006. This is the kind of market that is driving activity in companies like AOL with its acquisition of Tacoda, as well as companies like Revenue Science and Lotame.

The very definition of CPM is also changing as new models for media buying emerge. New ways to purchase and monetize connections between brand and consumers will emerge, including opportunities to move the point of purchase to these distributed applications. Not only will widgets incorporate ads based on individual behavior and areas of interest, but widgets will likely become e-commerce services as well. There is no reason why a social marketing program for a specific product can’t incorporate distributed shopping carts across sites where likely buyers congregate. The revenue opportunity for a widget-based checkout function distributed across social mega sites is already there.

New Media, New Optimism

Even with the less than positive economic news of the day, there is room for continued optimism about social media. What better way to navigate wavy financial waters than with low-cost, high-reach, targeted platforms that bring companies and consumers closer? Widgets are the conduits to our markets, and ultimately, people that matter to our business. Leveraging them humanizes not only the brand but interactions with the customer as well.

UserVoice offers a hosted way to harness the innovation and ideas of customers and potential customers that replaces email.

San Francisco based UserVoice improves the signal-to-noise of user opinion by allowing the moderation of the ideas of one person against the opinions of the many. UserVoice allows users to voice opinions, suggestions, and complaints. The video above demonstrates how it works (it’s difficult to pigeon hole) but think focus groups for companies that can’t afford focus groups, with elements of a forum and even Digg style voting thrown in for good measure.

For companies, UserVoice offers an open and transparent process for customer feedback to any company. The system also allows site owners to ask the community more directed questions (e.g. by a poll) about how users like a new feature or what they think of a specific idea.

I first saw UserVoice when I interviewed Guy King for CushyCMS (post here), King loves the service and although I didn’t video it, he spent 5 minutes showing me how they were using it. It’s always a good sign when people not involved with the company spontaneously evangelize a product. CushyCMS’s UserVoice page here and the official demo page for UserVoice can be viewed here.

The service is completely free during the public beta. UserVoice competes with SalesForce (IdeaExchange) and GetSatisfaction.

Userplane is announcing a second version of their Desktop product that’s based on newly released AIR and therefore compatible across operating systems. The Desktop product enables web developers to extend functionality outside of the browser with instant messaging, notifications, advertisements, and other general messages.

This new release should appeal to social network developers in particular who want to take advantage of AIR but don’t have the resources to develop a custom application on top of it. With the newest version of Userplane Desktop, available March 10th, they just need to provide customizations and the application will even run on Userplane’s servers.

Userplane Desktop comes in a free version, but developers will have to pay monthly charges depending on user levels if they want to get rid of advertisements.

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 get a synchronous conversation going. You won’ get enough people on your MySpace page to have a conversation. But with Meebo Rooms, most of the traffic is coming from somewhere else. It solves the problem of the Web being so distributed.

The power of Meebo Rooms is that they let anyone create live conversations on their site by aggregating people with similar interests from other sites. In fact, it links people between sites. And that, hopes Sternberg, will give it enough scale to become an ad network of sorts. Meebo has raised $12.5 million from Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Clavier, who has a degree in computer science, has been actively investing in startups over the last few years and has had notable successes such as Truveo (acquired by AOL for a rumored $50 million), Userplane (acquired by AOL for a rumored $35 million), MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo for $10 million), Kaboodle (acquired by Hearst for a rumored $30-40 million), Mayas Mom (acquired by BabyCenter for $7 million), Dogster, Kongregate, Edgeio and many others. In other words, he has an eye for winners. His investment philosophy will remain much the same, he says. He’s just now investing money from limited partners as well as his own capital.

He says he’ll invest the fund in a total of 30 to 40 seed stage startups with investments ranging from $100k – $500k. SoftTech VC will focus on consumer Internet.

Clavier has made four initial investments through the fund: Satisfaction Unlimited, Social Media Network, Grouply (which will launch at the conference today) and Active Athlete.

One problem though…the company has not gathered a critical mass of users and has sort of gone sideways. The company has survived on a very low burn rate, but there isn’t much buzz about it.

Now we’re hearing a rumor that the Meetro team is quietly building a new product – an easy “one-click” way of creating new forum on the fly. Instant messaging and forums are very similar businesses. In effect they are the same thing except that one is synchronous (IM) and one is asynchronous (forums). So the meetro team should have the expertise to create an interesting forum product. As an aside, another startup, Tangler, is tying the instant messaging and forum worlds together.

Meetro is being tight lipped about this, but some of the investors they are pitching are talking. We’ll post more information as we get it.

AOL is also rumored to be releasing a new forum product in the Fall. We’re hearing that the product was handed over to the Userplane team after some development difficulties (Userplane was acquired by AOL in August 2006). The new product is to be called Userplane Boards. Update: Userplane says this is not quite how things are. See CEO Michael Jones’ comment below.

Userplane Money serves ads in instant messaging, web chat and other widgets. The new program is said to be the first of its kind amongst community platforms.

Userplane CEO Mike Jones sees what he calls the “Platform Web” as the next area of online monetization. ” Userplane Money offers rich application experiences that increase user engagement on our clients’ websites, and provide them with a new revenue channel and increased site usage”.

Userplane was acquired by AOL in August 2006 and the new program is linked into AOL’s larger advertising strategy. “AOL has a rich offering of ad solutions for advertisers, including internal advertising within the AOL network, 3rd party publisher relationships through advertising.com, and a longtail ad offering through the Userplane network” said Jones.”Userplane Money grows the Userplane longtail ad network and gives advertisers access to users and inventory they had not had access to previously on smaller, targeted niche web communities”.

Jones sees Userplane Money as a way to reward users and position the service as a key revenue driver for smaller up and coming web communities.

The combination of Userplane’s technology with a revenue-sharing program is sure to drive future growth to what is already a very smart offering.

Previous TechCrunch coverage of Userplane here.

http://www.google.com/notebook/static_files/blank.html

Terms remain undisclosed, but there are rumors that this was a “very large deal”. Founded in LA in 2001, Userplane uses Flash and Ajax to offer video, audio and text chat in the browser, in single or multiple chat rooms. Those video and audio chats can be recorded using the company’s Webrecorder application. Its target audience has been social networking and dating sites but it’s technology has been deployed across 100,000 sites in 25 countries. Big customers have included Friendster, Date.com and Red Bull. Investor Jeff Clavier reports that the ad-supported version of Userplane recently broke the billion monthly ad impressions and has further discussion on the history of the company and this deal.

Userplane says that it hopes to work with a system of federated identity leveraging the AIM brand and intends to speed the pace of its innovation post-acquisition. I just spoke with Mike Jones, Userplane CEO, and he told me that one of the first ways the partnership will take shape is that users registered with Userplane client sites (like Tagged) will be able to be contacted via AIM by other site users even when they themselves are not on the original site. Extending presence through AIM, off-site and thus building a greater sense of community to users of Userplane supporing sites. Makes sense, but doesn’t address what AOL will do with Userplane.

Now that nearly everything is free at AOL, a compelling user experience could be key to maintaining the kinds of audiences advertisers will pay for. Recordable multi-room video chat could be one solid way to bring users in to AOL properties.

A very early TechCrunch profile of Userplane is here.

Founded: 2001

Location: Los Angeles

What is it?

Userplane is an application service provider to web 2.0 companies. They offer a suite of easy-to-integrate services, built on the flash platform, including chat, group chat, a webrecoder and, soon, a sitesearch product.

Typical Userplane customers are dating and social networking sites (any site that has users who would like to interact and/or create profiles that include audio/video content). The applications are polished, intuitive and fun to use.

In their own words, “Userplane is the premier provider of enterprise social software for online communities. Userplane Apps are easy to use, rapidly deployed Flash web applications that support live text and audio/video communication.

Deployed internationally on sites ranging from online dating to social networks to intranets, Userplane Apps reach millions of users in more than ten countries. Userplane Apps dramatically increase online interaction and improve guest-to-member conversion.”

Webmessenger Product:

This was the first product launched by Userplane. The Webmessenger product is a one-to-one instant messaging client that includes text, audio and video features. Janet Song, Userplane’s Marketing Director, gave us a demo of the product:

Webchat Product:

Webchat is group chat. It has all of the features of web messenger, and also allows users to see who is watching their video and/or listening to their audio. It can support an unlimited number of users, and a single user can view up to four videos simultaneously.

Webrecorder Product:

This is a feature that sites can add to easily allow their users to record and play back audio/video messages.

The products are deployed on the flash platform and non-userplane branded. Pricing starts at $50 per month (there is a free version of the webchat product that is add supported as well). Integration can be as easy as inserting an html script, or sites can choose a full integration into their database to include user’s site profile information.

Userplane keeps a low profile, but their customers are blue-chip – they include friendster, eharmony, honda, date.com and red bull

Management:

Michael Jones – Co-founder and CEO
Nathanial Thelen – Co-founder and CTO
Javier Hall – Co-founder and CCO
Janet Song – Director of Marketing

Links:

Blog
Press
Under The Radar

Tags: socialnetworking, onlinedating, web2.0, techcrunch, userplane