IM Archive

I stumbled across a new online chat application that brings together people and language translation. MeGlobe calls itself an instant messaging application but I’d argue that they offer a public chat service rather than a traditional IM offering. MeGlobe offers a public directory so you can find other people who speak the language you are interested in. It’s great for discovery in that regard.

MeGlobe offers real-time translation into: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Greek, Swedish, Arabic, Japanese, Korean and Chinese Traditional and Simplified.

Josh Lowensohn reviewed MeGlobe on Webware and compared it to Meebo in that it opens a window with a chat interface. Josh tested it with French-English and I tested it with German-English and it did a good job. As Josh notes, if you change your language during a chat, MeGlobe will translate the history into the currently selected language.

MeGlobe isn’t connected to any of the major IM networks which will hurt their user adoption. I could see MeGlobe partnering with Meebo or eBuddy to inject the MeGlobe translation service into the already powerful IM services. On the flip side, your current buddies on any IM service probably already speak the same language you do.

Here’s the company’s demo video:

Editor’s note: eBuddy is a current CN sponsor.

Do you watch soap operas? If not, let me explain the basic storyline. Jack loves Mary. Jack and Mary get married. A week later, Mary finds out that Jack was cheating with Mary’s sister who already has 2 babies from Jack’s father. At that point, Mary shoots Jack but finds out that Jenna made up the whole story just so Jenna could get back at Sarah. That’s two months of shows rolled up into 30 seconds.

Let’s switch the channel to As The Twitter Turns. One day the storyline is, "Twitter is a failwhale and I am moving to FriendFeed". The next day we hear from the same people, "Twitter is so great for things like today’s Earthquake". Tomorrow Twitter won’t load for one of the "family of fail" members and immediately "failwhale" will appear on the Google Trends list again. And on and on and on.

It’s interesting how quickly the Twitter team is to highlight how awesome Twitter is instead of fixing their internal issues. You can slap chocolate ice cream on a rusty nail but it’s still going to taste like crap. Change the rusty nail to a slice of pound cake and now the chocolate ice cream will taste much, much better. Posts like todays help to fuel the "family of fail" when the service isn’t working properly tomorrow.

Nowhere do we see the sheep line up in formation better than around Twitter. One head sheep tells the other sheep to go fail, they all go fail. Then the same head sheep tells the other sheep to go great, they all go great.

Picking on Twitter is old and played out. It was cute for a while but it’s time to move on folks. If you aren’t happy on Twitter, check out, delete your profile and move to a service that meets your needs. When Twitter is down, we all know it – there’s no reason for everyone to announce it on the other social services.

Today NYC blogger Steve Rubel lose it (if that’s possible) and ask for people to start talking about success instead of fail(ure). I am with him. Enough is enough – I know it’s "cool" and "uber geek" to run around wearing a tshirt with the failwhale and talking about fail this and fail that, but c’mon already. Based on Rubel’s suggestion, Flickr user Lemansey has created the success whale displayed below.

Let’s all stop the soap opera and get back to talking about technology. There are plenty of other topics to discuss.

Update: JungleG has a look at why Twitter will never fail and people should just stop talking about it. 

Amsterdam-based chat service eBuddy is announcing this morning that they have hit the 1 billion mobile messages sent using their service each month. In fact, this month I am told that it’s 1.1 billion mobile messages. They have also shared that the eBuddy mobile client has been downloaded over 5 million times and 2 million unique users have sent the above 1.1 billion mobile messages.

eBuddy CEO Jan-Joost Rueb tells me that the mobile Web client has been used by 600,000 iPhone users and by over a million Sony PSP users to-date.

eBuddy is also announcing the launch of updated software for both their J2ME and mobile Internet browser clients. The J2ME client has been updated with a new interface and support for eBuddy ID which allows for a user to connect to multiple networks using one eBuddy account.

It’s interesting to watch eBuddy and Meebo take different paths over the last year and yet both are successful with thier product roadmaps. Check out all of our eBuddy coverage including our interview with Rueb.

Editor’s note: eBuddy is a current sponsor of CenterNetworks.

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.

Userplane has been on a roll with their distribution deals recently. Userplane has created widgets for a variety of content management systems and most recently partnered with ConVerdge on chat and IM integration.

Today NY-based KickApps and AOL-subsidiary Userplane are announcing a partnership which will bring live chat, IM and presence functionality into the KickApps social networking platform. Both the Userplane Webchat and Userplane Webmessenger tools will carry advertising and publishers can also use a buyout option to remove or control the ads within the widgets.

Check out our exclusive interviews with Userplane CEO Michael Jones and KickApps CEO Alex Blum.

On a side note, KickApps is now referring to their service as the, "World’s First Social Graph Engine". I wonder if they paid a marketing firm to come up with that tagline!

Editor’s note: KickApps is a sponsor on our sister site, HTMLCenter.

After the launch of the Meebo Marketing Platform last month, online chat provider Meebo is announcing a variety of music distribution partnerships today. The new partnerships include DashGo, Nettwerk Music Group, Sparkart, and Wind-up Records. These companies represent artists including Avril Lavigne, Evanescence, The Killers, Seether, Tim McGraw, Thriving Ivory, and Weezer. This brings the number of artists using Meebo Rooms for integrated site chat to over 100.

The partnership will being Meebo’s SparkAds advertising product to integrated Meebo Rooms which are integrated into the artist’s Web site. Revenue will be shared between Meebo and the artist.

Meebo reports 35 million people using their IM and chat apps monthly. The average Meebo.com user spends over two hours on the site per day. Check out our interview with CEO Seth Sternberg.

Userplane has announced a distribution deal this morning wth ConVerdge. ConVerdge is a white label social networking provider focusing on the community side of the house.

The first two Userplane products to be integrated are Webchat2 and Webmessenger2. Webchat2 is a text, video and voice widget while Webmessenger2 is an instant messaging product. Userplane says further distribution with ConVerdge will be coming soon.

While not directly mentioned, Userplane’s social ad network will certainly play a role in this distribution. Their ad network serves over 500 million ads a month to over 50 million monthly users. This could lead to incremental revenue for the ConVerdge sites that load the Userplane tools.

The first ConVerdge site they have rolled out this new functionality is the Mashable community site. The Mashable community currently shows over 60,000 members (I am guessing 10-15% are active).

To learn more about Userplane, check out our Conversation With Userplane CEO Michael Jones.