Meebo Archive

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.

Update: Marshall at RWW has additional information on Meebo’s advertising plans.

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.