"Social connections are an increasingly important traffic source; it’s crucial for websites to take advantage of that," says Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg. "The Meebo Bar makes it easy for publishers to add social functionality to their sites, and provide a persistent, open experience on multiple networks that makes sharing and chat simple, fun and engaging for users."

"The introduction of the Meebo Bar has added value for both our audience and advertisers," says Tom Kirwan, EW’s National Director of Digital Sales. "The functionality increases users’ engagement and interactivity with our content, while simultaneously allowing advertisers a unique opportunity to be front and center."

In the fall, Meebo plans to introduce new advertising and branding products, including an interactive ad placement with customized skins and sponsored buttons.

Meebo claims to reach a quarter of the U.S. Internet population with 52 million unique monthly visitors and 110 million worldwide. Monthly visitors have increased nearly 300% over the last 10 months, the company says.

After some hard work from the folks here at Meebo and help from a whole host of people at Facebook, we now have Facebook back in Meebo.

Plus, Meebo is now the first launch partner of the “alpha” version of the Facebook Connect + Chat integration. That’s pretty cool.

Original Article from 01/09: Less than a month ago, Meebo announced that it would begin including both MySpace and Facebook into its instant messaging and group chat services. These two networks joined AIM, Yahoo, Google, MSN, and others in Meebo’s repertoire.

However, Facebook has now  requested that Meebo remove its network for the time being, and Meebo has complied. Seth at the Meebo blog writes:

We have been speaking to the Facebook team, and it turns out, they’d like us to connect to their network in a different way – a way that works with their log-in security protocols. In the interim, they asked us take Facebook off Meebo, and we agree with them.

However, we were glad to hear that the Facebook team was genuinely excited to see their network on Meebo, especially since they already have plans to open Facebook Chat. They also committed resources from their Chat and Facebook Connect teams to do extra work with us to get Facebook Chat back on Meebo “really, really soon.”

In December, Meebo’s users grew to about 45 million, presumably as a result of adding MySpace and Facebook connectivity. Seth did not share how many of those are from Facebook, but I would imagine Meebo is eagerly awaiting getting the fast-growing social network back on board.

This makes Meebo basically a way to chat with friends who are online via any of the services mentioned above. If they add Twitter integration, there will be no stopping them. There is a possibility that Facebook could take itself away from Meebo though. Eric Eldon at VentureBeat explains:

Facebook and MySpace both offer their own chat services, where they turn your friends on the sites into IM contacts. While MySpace and Meebo worked together to offer this new feature, Meebo went out and figured out Facebook’s IM protocol by itself.

So maybe Facebook is going to cut off Meebo from accessing its IM service? Or maybe not.Social.IM, a startup recently acquired by iSkoot, has already integrated Facebook IM together with other IM services in a desktop app — and it’s still functional. Social.IM’s service has you login directly to Facebook, and it doesn’t store your Facebook data. Desktop IM aggregator Adium and Meebo rival eBuddy’s mobile service also includes Facebook chat integration.

But right now, it appears that Meebo has gotten a lot more useful, considering the tremendous amount of growth Facebook continues to see on a daily basis. Meebo seems to be having a pretty good year’s end.  Not even a month ago Meebo partnered with Universal Music Group on an interactive project putting users in touch with musicians.

Universal and Meebo will provide Meebo users with ad-supported videos from a number of big-name artists. The deal kicks off with offerings from Kanye West, Ludacris, and The Killers. They will embed Meebo Rooms on official artist pages to enable real-time social interactions among fans. This way they can talk to each other, and in some cases, actually talk to the artists themselves. For example, Universal once used Meebo Rooms to coordinate a live chat with LL Cool J. They also used Meebo for an online listening party for a Kanye West album.

"Whether it’s rock from The Killers or hip-hop from Kanye West, Meebo users are extremely passionate about their music and enjoy sharing that premium content en masse with their friends," said Martin Green, COO of Meebo. "The partnership between Meebo and UMG gives our users the ability to engage with thousands of videos from the world’s largest music company."

"UMG’s Video Syndication Program allows for music fans to access videos in fun and easy ways at affiliate websites," said Larry Baach, Senior Vice President, Global Digital Initiatives, Universal Music Group. "Meebo, our latest affiliate, has a unique inter-operative IM feature that has captured the interest of a young, extremely loyal, and very active user base. UMG is always working toward better consumer experiences of our artists’ videos and we look forward to Meebo’s continued and inventive focus on music video." Meebo’s iPhone compatibliity should greatly enhance the sharing of content as well.

Over 300 musicians have used Meebo Rooms to interact with fans and promote albums since the site’s launch in May of last year. Now that this deal with Universal has taken place, I would expect a great many more to follow suit.

These networks – or any users, really – should provide positive publicity for both Joost and Meebo, the latter of which powers Channel Chat.  And actually, since Meebo users can reach people on a number of instant-messing products (including AIM, Yahoo, and Google Talk), there will be few things to stand in the way of the service’s spread.

Yet Jason Jennings writes, “I look forward to seeing these two services integrated and also to see if Joost is able to build a good enough catalog to be worth while for TV fanatics like myself,” and it’s that catalog that appears to act as a barrier.

I was happy, for example, to see Red Green heavily featured on Joost’s iLaugh channel.  A Joost search for “Red Green” only yields 41 results, however, while YouTube offers around 15,000.  Users will have to decide for themselves if an added chat feature can make up for a deficit of over 10,000 videos.

The features for meebo for iPhone include access to instant messaging accounts through a single login and single buddy list. Messages with buddies can be accessed from any Web browser including mobile or desktop.

Using meebo for the iPhone does not require any software to be downloaded as meebo updates depending on the phone specifications.

"Safari on the iPhone has enabled a new level of mobile innovation – it’s the most advanced web browser ever put on a portable device. Our application for the iPhone now provides a seamless experience between your computer’s browser and your phone’s browser," said Seth Sternberg, founder and CEO, meebo. "meebo truly is instant messaging everywhere!"

Doctor Google: Healthcare Through Search

Among the fastest growing is Meebo, from where users can log in to several different IM clients without downloading an application. Between August 2006 and June 2007, Meebo grew by 354 percent from 434,000 users to 1.972 million.

Multimedia chat providers IMVU, which allows users to create interactive avatars grew by 154 percent over the same time period, from 491,000 users to 1.248 million.

Google Talk beats the other two in number of users, but is third in triple-digit growth, spiking 149 percent to increase from 904,000 users to 2.252 million.

“Now that instant messaging has become an established form of communication, providers are seeking to distinguish themselves with expanded access and additional functionalities. These recent trends in traffic indicate that users are excited about seeing where the technology is going next,” said Jason Lee, media analyst, Nielsen//NetRatings.

However, they’ve all a long row to hoe to catch up with AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo, all of whom have tens of millions of users.

Some interesting observations came to the people at uptime monitoring firm Pingdom.

They managed to get seven noteworthy websites to agree to share some details about their infrastructure.

None of them seemed willing to part with an administrator password, oddly enough.

The websites surveyed for the report: TechCrunch, FeedBurner, iStockphoto, YouSendIt, Meebo, Vimeo, and Alexaholic.

They were nearly unanimous with their choice of database backends.

MySQL owned the field, as six of seven sites said they use it. All but Alexaholic run MySQL on Linux; Alexaholic uses Microsoft SQL Server on Windows.

To get pages to their web visitors, five of the seven sites chose Apache, as have the bulk of other websites on the Internet.

Alexaholic runs IIS on Windows, while Meebo has tapped relative newcomer Lighttpd, called ‘Lighty’, for their web serving requirements.

Except for Alexaholic, the other webservers all run on Linux.

“Lighttpd tends to work really well with AJAX-based sites like ours,” said Simon Yeo, director of operations at Meebo, in the blog.

Lighttpd also boasts usage at big-time sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia.

PHP has a place on five of the seven sites, either on its own or in conjunction with other languages like Perl or Java.

Alexaholic’s Ron Hornbaker favored C# .NET, which is in line with his comfort zone, while Meebo primarily has C and C++ in its code.

When asked about his Microsoft favoritism, Hornbaker told Pingdom he’s familiar with the .NET platform.

“I’m most comfortable coding with C#.NET, and this was a personal project,” he said.
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It’s an essential tool for keeping the different parts of your digital world distinct from each other.

The folks at Cerulean Studios (the creators of Trillian) are busy at work with a new supped up version of their program, code name Astra. Besides the advancements in interoperability (they’re adding MySpaceIM and a plugin for Google Talk versus the Jabber protocol they’ve used to this point), they are pushing the limits in what an IM client is all about by adding Social Widgets (e.g., weather for friends’ locations), chat via the Web (somewhat similar to Meebo), and RSS updates within message windows.

I don’t have too much more info to share because the project is currently in Alpha testing. If they were smart though, they’d let me into their testing program so I can tell them what they are doing wrong .

Stay tuned for the release of Trillian Astra.

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Ken Yarmosh is a consultant who helps organizations get the most out of their technology investments. He works with technology users and creators across various industries, focusing on technology education and strategy. With over 7 years IT experience, Ken has worked with small businesses, non-profits, federal agencies, and multi-million dollar companies.

His online efforts include acting as the Editor for the Corante Technology Hub and authoring the TECHNOSIGHT blog.

Yahoo And MSN Chat With Each Other

Another walled garden is in the process of being dismantled. Instant messenger (IM) users have been restricted in communicating with users on separate systems. The frustration over this has led to a demand for better interoperability.

Software solutions like Trillian, and web services like Meebo, have been available to address the problem. Those approaches allow a user to combine IM profiles from several services into one place, and chat with all of their contacts.

Give two things credit for the breaking down of the wall between Microsoft and Yahoo, which announced their plans for interoperability last year: consumer demand and online advertising. People wanted control of their messaging experience. They can email anyone on any system, or call from a cellphone to any other cellphone, without a problem.

Why should IM be any different?

The desire for control led to demand for Trillian and similar clients. It also provided the motivation for clever people like those at Meebo to attack the problem from a use-anywhere web perspective.

Those two solutions provide the interoperability that appeared unlikely before the Yahoo-Microsoft disclosure last year, and the opening of the beta test today. But make no mistake about it, alternative solutions for users do not carry advertising, and keeping users on a feature-rich interoperable client with ad displays had to be a motivating factor.

From a joint statement issued by the two companies (spacing added):

Now that the two have torn down the wall, it is time to consider, AIM, AOL’s IM service. AIM has largely resisted any interoperability and has at times been a barrier to third-party clients accessing its services.

Again, it comes back to advertising and revenue opportunities. Yahoo and Microsoft have not divulged if any revenue sharing will take place. Considering that a typical user will keep an IM client active for hours online, the issue of advertising is not a minor one.

AOL has shifted much of its content online in the past 12 months. The company may make the rest of its closed services, like AOL email, available for free to broadband users, pending the approval of the Time Warner board.

Maybe that will be the harbinger of an interoperable AIM service. If everyone can work out the money issues, that is.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.