Meebo

Instant messaging and chat application provider Meebo is announcing a variety of social networking partnerships today. The companies announced today include Buddy Media, Commagere Ventures, FrozenBear, K-Factor Media, Mesmo TV, Rockstarted, Spicerack Media, Trippert Labs, and Unit 501. The partnership brings syndication to the Meebo Rooms product inside of the various social applications.

The company reports 100 million user minutes spent engaged with partner applications, the average person at Meebo.com spends over two hours on the site per day, and Meebo handles conversations consisting of over 5 billion messages per month.

Earlier this month Meebo launched their Meebo Marketing Platform include SparkAds. Check out our interview with Meebo founder Seth Sternberg.

Today at the Conversational Marketing Summit in NYC, Meebo will announce the launch of the "Meebo Marketing Platform". There are four components to the Meebo Marketing Platform which include: Meebo MediaBar, Meebo SparkAds, Link Sharing, and a partnership with 33Across. The goal of the marketing platform is to connect brands with Meebo users but more importantly for Meebo users to share the ads with other Meebo users and make the ads viral. What could be better for a brand than a person sharing an advertisement with a friend?

The Meebo Mediabar is a rich media ad panel that can run basically anything in the space from games, applications, feeds, and digital goods. Next is SparkAds which are text ads that will drive clicks to brand sites. Link Sharing currently allows for a way to share and discover links between friends and now will be used as a viral system where advertisers seed their links and then Meebo users push them around the network. The 33Across partnership allows advertisers more in-depth analysis of the campaigns run on Meebo.

What I didn't see in the notes was whether 33Across helps to increase conversion while the ads are running and whether immediate user feedback is reported. This is the key with any ad campaigns on conversational sites. People will react and it's critical that the brand is monitoring public channels for the feedback so they can optimize in real-time accordingly.

The initial brands signed to the "Meebo Marketing Platform" include: Havaianas, Sony Electronics, Universal Pictures, and the band Weezer.

I plan to watch this launch closely as viral advertising will continue to slowly grow this year. If brands maximize this type of advertising, it could change online advertising as a whole. The idea of sharing an advertisement could almost be seen as an endorsement by the sending user and could push the receiving user to actually interact with the ad. Real-time monitoring and updating is the key for success with this new type of online advertising.

This April, Meebo hired a chief revenue officer who is located in NYC. Also check out our interview with Meebo founder Seth Sternberg.

Meebo is announcing this morning the hire of Carter Brokaw has joined the company as Chief Revenue Officer today. Brokaw most recently was with Warner Music Group and also worked for CNET for over 10 years in a variety of sales positions. Brokaw will be based in NYC!

"Meebo is a highly-promising company with an incredible team and defendable technology," said Carter Brokaw, Chief Revenue Officer, Meebo. "From a monetization perspective, I’m looking forward to helping leverage Meebo’s core strength by bringing brands into the conversation in ways that are engaging, integrated and measurable."

There were reports yesterday that Meebo wasn't able to sell themselves so they are now pursuing raising another round of funding.

Check out our interview with Meebo founder Seth Sternberg.

Brightcove has announced a number of new strategic distribution partnerships today. The companies involved in the deal are: Bebo, Meebo, RockYou, Slide and Veoh. What this deal means is that customers using the Brighcove Internet TV platform can now also distribute their videos on the above named company platforms.

Here's how Jeremy Allaire, Brighcove founder describes the deal, "The distribution partnerships announced today will make an exciting array of high-quality, premium video content available to be viewed on Bebo channels, shared through viral widgets from RockYou and Slide on Facebook and MySpace, included in instant messaging activities on Meebo, and viewed in full-screen at Veoh's Internet Television portal."

They also claim that these new distribution partnerships will reach over 300 million viewers. No mention of overlap between the services. At the end of the day, distribution could mean more viewers but could also work to dilute a video brand. I wrote about this topic last week.

Brightcove has signed a variety of partnerships recently including IAC, Fox and Channel 4 in the U.K.

Online chat provider meebo is announcing the launch of their "meebo rooms API" along with the "meebo Network" which is an advertising play for the larger meebo customers. They are launching these tools with five key partners: Piczo, Revision3, RockYou, Social Project, and Tagged.

meebo rooms API

The API takes the standard meebo rooms program to the next level with more customization and options. meebo notes regarding the releas, "The new API will automate the creation, configuration and monetization of meebo rooms for partners allowing them to integrate rooms into their user registration databases, and content management and publishing systems."

meebo Network

The new meebo Network is only available for "marquee partners" and appears to be an ad network tied into the meebo Rooms API above. meebo claims that the new ads will be: unobtrusive and user-friendly. The partners will share in the revenue generated by the ads.

We are starting to see more of the meebo business model revealed - pushing ads out to partners is a good idea assuming the partners have input on what ads are shown. Will we next see ads inside the meebo widgets that so many blogs and Web sites are using?

As for the latest metrics, meebo is self-reporting its total monthly reach at 25 million people.

Rememeber the game of Risk? Today it's like that game between Meebo and eBuddy. Meebo controls North America and eBuddy controls the rest of the World but overall the market is probably split 50/50. Meebo is releasing a couple stats today: 6.5 million unique users monthly at meebo.com and in November alone, 16.5 million unique users visited meebo widgets distributed across the Web by partners and users. The latter number is a bit of a stretch as it refers to widget load, not actual touching of said widget.

Meebo is also announcing support for Facebook applications via their meebo rooms, Partner Edition. Meebo notes that the following applications have already launched meebo rooms, Partner Edition: BuddyMedia, (fluff)Friends, RockYou, Slide, The Broth and WaterCooler, Inc. RockYou, a leading applications and widgets provider, launched 12 meebo rooms today for the highly-popular Facebook application Horoscopes – a different meebo room for each sign of the Zodiac. Next year the Partner Edition will begin to offer a rev share.

The other features of the Partner Edition they sent over include:

• Brand customization and Flash skinning. Partner Edition gives brands full control of the look and feel of their meebo rooms to create a seamless user and design experience between your brand and meebo technology.
• Integration with Facebook’s existing registration system. Facebook Edition authenticates logged user sessions and lets users take their registered names and user photos into the room with them, without requiring a meebo account.
• Automated capacity spillover. Designed for highly-trafficked application and canvas pages, new rooms spawn automatically when capacity is reached.
• Advertising tracking. Partners can seamlessly embed and track advertising in a room’s media queue to monetize traffic inside meebo rooms.
• Traffic and data reporting. Facebook Edition offers enhanced traffic and data reporting capability to measure campaign effectiveness and results.

On Thursday, Meebo will announce a new partnership with VideoEgg to monetize the applications build on the Meebo Platform. We spoke with VideoEgg CMO Troy Young about their Facebook platform advertising and my guess is the same points will apply for the Meebo platform. And Troy added regarding the partnership, "The meebo Platform and partner applications offer an excellent environment to connect users to brand content. With this partnership, the Eggnetwork will grow well beyond the 50 million unique users we reach today."

Marshall calls Meebo a closed platform but I think his use of the word "closed" is incorrect. Meebo requires approval for applications to use the platform whereas Facebook allows anyone to create applications on its platform.

Over 40 multiuser and synchronous applications are available to meebo users today. Titles from 3rd Sense, Absolutist, AddictingGames, BladeSix, Clearspring Technologies, Come2Play, Feedhaus, Gamebrew, MeBeam, MediaGreenhouse, Mochi Media, Jiggmin, Kongregate, PlayFirst, Presidio Media, Pudding Media, TalkShoe, TokBox, Ustream.tv, uWink, wellgames, and ZeroCode exemplify the kinds of multiuser and synchronous applications being built on the meebo Platform every day.

Meebo has been making some huge moves recently including gaming and Joost for chat. Check out our interview with CEO Seth Sternberg as well. Meebo can no longer just be considered a Web IM client.

We've written about Meebo a bunch of times before including an interview with CEO Seth Sternberg. When Meebo launched their platform, I joked. Today, it's me who has egg on the face. Mike and Kristen have the news about the first use of the platform -- this time it's games; casual games in fact. I've learned in a former life that casual games are one of the best (if not the best) ways to engage customers. For Meebo it increases the engagement time which allows for more marketing time. RadiusIM spoke last night about the engagement time and how high it is for IM services, gaming just raises it one more notch.

Check out this list of available games: AddictingGames’ Fratboy Unicycle Relay, Animal Puzzle, Artillery, Attack, Backgammon, Battle Pool, Blackjack, Checkers, Chess, Connect4, Go, Kongregate Racing, Match4, Music Man, Picture This!, Pirate War, Platform Racing, Reversi, Sheep Me, Sploder, Sudoku Wars, Tactics 100, Texas Hold ‘em, and World Travel Puzzle.

This comes on the heels of the Meebo announcement as the selected chat partner for Joost.

Perhaps we could create a holiday web tech blogger gaming battle royal with proceeds to charity. While I might not be on top of the TechMeme leaderboard, no one can take down my combo button action!

In the beginning, meebo was "just" a chat aggregator. Over time they have grown to add Rooms, a Platform and they are announcing a partnership tonight with Joost. Meebo will provide their Rooms technology for the 250 channels on the Joost network. Nielsen/NetRatings reports that Meebo is the fastest growing IM destination (they don't include eBuddy in the report).

Joost presented at the NY Video Meetup last week. I noticed a much improved user experience over the initial version I tested earlier this year. If you haven't tried Joost recently, I would try it again. Does the combo of Joost and Meebo leapfrog Hulu? If the integration is seamless, it could be pretty sweet. The part I am unclear about is whether the Meebo Rooms for the channels will be embedded into the Joost interface or a link to the Meebo room will be provided.

"Participation in community activities has emerged as one of the most significant trends in consumer behavior," said Mike Volpi, CEO of Joost. "By offering our viewers a robust channel chat option, they can chat with people interested in the same shows and subjects - and ultimately customize and enrich their entertainment experiences."

"Even in an on-demand environment like Joost, people can experience live community around popular channels and shows," said Seth Sternberg, CEO and co-founder, meebo. "According to a recent internal survey at meebo, 25% of meebo users IM while watching TV - there's a lot more we can be doing to connect people who share a common passion around a specific show or genre."

Check out our interview with Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg.

I got the news tip today that Meebo is launching file sharing on Tuesday. What I am unsure about from the below message is whether this is a traditional p2p where I send directly to you or if they actually store the file on a server somewhere. I am not crazy about the latter but the former moves Meebo closer to Pownce land. What's great is that meebo already has my buddies and I don't have to re-friend everyone again. If Meebo added a twitter-like public board, it would be killer.

Here are some details sent over earlier today:

Today, File Transfer comes to meebo! You can now seamlessly transfer files to your IM buddies, on meebo or off meebo, regardless of which IM network they're on, no software or download required.

"We're so happy to be debuting file transfer on meebo. This answers a huge feature request from our users," said Seth Sternberg, founder and CEO, meebo. "Please let us know what you think!"

At its core, File Transfer utilizes the Amazon (AMZN) Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), core features of Amazon Web Services. Together, they provide an affordable, scalable and fault-tolerant solution to file storage and retrieval in a web environment.