We’ve caught rumor of a new Meebo competitor in the web IM space called Wablet. Development is underway in both San Francisco and the Philippines. Reader Mike Abundo, a tech writer from the Philippines, claimed it was going to blow away Meebo in a comment responding to our coverage of the new Meebome offering last week. Aiming to create “a highly scalable next generation instant messaging and communications platform,” the company was hiring a senior web developer and Datacenter/Linux Administrator for their US location in May.
A beta appeared late last month on a Filipino Flash developer’s site, but has since been taken down. I’m very curious to find out more about this mysterious company and I expect they’ll be making an appearance soon. They’ve got some steep competition with Meebo, eBuddy and KoolIM (links to our reviews) all making strong showings in the web IM space. That’s no reason to stop innovating, of course.
If whispers about startups in stealth are your thing, check out this blog post by Mitch Kapor (co-founder of Lotus 1-2-3 in the 80’s, amongst other things) about a new startup he’s pushing towards beta. Based on the Foxmarks bookmarking plug-in for Firefox, the new company will be a search play based on aggregate data from social bookmarking – but with a strong privacy policy, a threshold of multiple users bookmarking something before it’s included in the search index and results that go beyond that single system’s users. Sounds like something that’s needed to happen for awhile. We found that one via Richard McManus.