Meebo Announces Cross-Site, Integrated IM for Online Communities

Yesterday I met with Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg who took me through some new Meebo functionality coming this fall. The new service offering is called Meebo Community IM and it's pretty sweet. Here's the short description of Meebo Community IM: integrated 1-1 instant messaging for sites that have registered members. The Meebo Community IM works across sites so you can actually view your buddies on all of the partner sites.

The initial launch partners include companies like Flixster, myYearbook and Sugar Publishing. Game aggregator AddictingGames is also a launch partner. Seth tells me that they can "easily" launch sites with small amounts of traffic and are working to support much larger sites as well. Meebo's SparkAds program will deliver ads inside of the chat and the revenue will be shared with the launch partners. To signup as a partner site, go to meebo.com/communityim.

When you visit a partner site, a small toolbar will appear at the bottom of the screen. This is the chat bar and will allow you to see your buddies that are online currently. If your buddies are offline, you can leave them a message and it will be delivered when they sign on. The most interesting part is that you can "pop-out" the toolbar and so you can chat and interact with your buddies on the partner sites even when you aren't actually on the sites themselves. The toolbar looks very much like the Facebook IM toolbar. I've embedded some screenshots of how the functionality will work below.

In version 2 of the Meebo Community IM platform, you will be able to exchange your social graph across multiple partner sites. If you are on site A, you will be able to see and chat with your buddies on sites B and C. The friends lists come from the friends on each of the partner sites.

What makes the Meebo Community IM exciting is that any site that has members can now offer this new social layer with very little technical work and could heavily increase the usage of the site.

Seth left me by noting that they are looking for talented engineers. If you are interested, give Seth a ring.