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.
