Meebo

TechCrunch has an exclusive story about an evening launch of Yahoo's new web-based (browser) chat application. So now you can access Messenger from the browser. But in the grand scheme of things, why would I leave eBuddy or Meebo for this?

While the average Yahoo Messenger user has no idea about these other aggregation services for instant messaging, the smart Internet user would have no reason to switch. Or am I missing something?

Though for the average Internet user, this upgrade might prove great. You can use both Yahoo and MSN chat buddies within the Yahoo window. TechCrunch notes that the new browser version will be limited in functionality to begin with. From the screencapture it appears like a very basic chat window. I would like to see things like Mail, and other widgets as well. Let me customize what I want on this page and I can see more value added to it over the eBuddy/Meebo players.

There is a screencast of the new version available on the Yahoo site.

Unfortunately I am not on Yahoo's press list so these are all the details I have to share at this point. If a Yahoo is reading this, feel free to add me to your press list. I am now on the list!

Have you ever wondered what web, database and network servers some of the biggest new tech sites are running? What about their network connectivity and admin passwords?

Pingdom, a web site monitoring service, contacted the companies below and put together a pretty great report. You can download the report here or check out their full blog entry.

Come inside to check out the companies in the report plus a bit of my commentary.

Business 2.0 has a nice article today highlighting 25 startups that will "strike gold" in 2007. It's a lot of clicking to view them all, so here are direct links to all 25. While I am certain they left some winners off the list, they appear to have hit it pretty close to target. The only one I am not sure of is Revision3. This one goes if/as Digg goes. Digg does well, so will Rev3 and vice-versa.

Well as the AlwaysOn conference comes to an end (my wrapup will come late tonight), I had a chance to chat with Seth Sternberg. Seth is the CEO of Meebo and a really brilliant guy. He is also pretty well connected from the number of handshakes, nods and waves during our discussion! Have a listen inside. Also, Meebo is hiring programmers and developers.

Last workshop of the day, mastering the mashup. Seth from Meebo, Itzik from Clipsync, Rex from Davetv and Danny from Etelos are on the panel.

Today Meebo released a whole new version of their site. It looks amazing. They've updated the whole look, and added some functionality. I thought I would just give a run-through of what went down, and what all was changed.

Meebo hits the 500,000th user mark. Pretty cool for one of the companies that I think rocks.