meebo
Latest
Meebo to retire toolbar on June 6th, plans to focus on Google+ instead
Just over a year ago Google snapped up a little social outfit called Meebo, quickly dismantling most of the firm's services. The lone survivor? The Meebo Bar, an unobtrusive social toolbar that offers Facebook, Twitter and Google+ connectivity as well as minimal advertising. Nothing lasts forever though -- Meebo has announced that the Meebo Bar will stop functioning on June 6th 2013. It's a bit of a bummer for sites that employ the tool, but at least they won't have to do anything to deactivate the service: Meebo says the code should become inert as soon as the service discontinues. The team says it plans to focus its efforts on Google+ Sign-In and Google+ plug-ins, which it sees as the best way to serve desktop and mobile publishers in the future.
The Meebo Bar returns, this time with more Google+
Back in the balmy heat of June Google snapped up (and then largely dismantled) a new property by the name of Meebo. Now, as winter starts to bite, it looks like the one part it was going to keep -- the tool bar -- is back in full Google livery. The discovery comes after a few eagle-eyed users noticed it on TV Guide. The bar itself seems pretty unobtrusive right now, with just some site specific menus on the left hand side, with the expected Google+ sharing options on the right. Overall, though, things look much like before only more... Googly. Don't believe us? Or just want to see what's different? Head over to the more coverage links for a good old before and after.
Google retiring iGoogle, Google Mini, others for 'spring cleaning'
To everything (Turn, Turn, Turn). There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn). Sometimes those seasons can get a bit convoluted, however -- or such is the premise of Google's "Spring cleaning in summer" post, outlining the end of a handful of tech offerings. Because heck, even a company as big as Google has to pick its battles. On the chopping block this time out are the Google Mini enterprise search system, the Google Talk Chatback widget, Google Video, iGoogle and the Symbian search app. Of course, the company won't be leaving people hanging entirely. Google's pushing users toward existing properties like the Meebo bar for Talk Chatback and YouTube for Google Video (which already stopped taking uploads a while back), the latter of which will be fully integrated into the more popular video offering come August. More info on what all this means in the source link below.
PSA: Some Meebo services shutting down starting next month
News barely just hit the airwaves about Google snapping up social platform Meebo, and already it's being dismantled. As from July 11th, Meebo Messenger, Sharing on Meebo, MeeboMe and all the mobile apps will be shutting down. In the meantime you'll still be able to download chat logs, sharing history and so on, but you'll need to hop on quick, before the final curtain. Meebo does confirm, however, that its Bar product will continue to be available, and receive support, for the at least the coming months.
Google set to gobble up Meebo, plans to expand the social platform to new heights
An interesting twist in the world of social media came today with confirmation that Google has entered into an agreement to purchase Meebo, a company known for its eponymous Meebo Bar. Primarily a platform that's intended to drive consumer engagement with brands via a social medium, Meebo also provides advertisers a less-intrusive way to reach their target audiences. Meebo announced the acquisition on its blog, and hints that its team will work with Google to grow and improve the platform. It's unclear whether Google intends to integrate the Meebo Bar into its own online properties, or whether the Mountain View giant simply views it as a method to increase its advertising reach. Regardless, it seems a bit of a no-brainer that Google+ will soon find a new home in the Meebo Bar. While the final purchase price remains a bit of a mystery, AllThingsD sources peg the deal in the neighborhood of $100 million. Not a bad way to start a Monday. Update: TechCrunch has confirmed the purchase price to be "around $100 million," with most of the team to work on Google+. Unfortunately, it seems that not everyone will be making the jump, with layoffs aimed at "sales and marketing."
iPhone news roundup: benchmarks, Facebook, and (obviously) rumors
There was a lot of iPhone chatter this week -- although Apple might have done all it can to lock the little bugger down, it seems people are still finding ways to extend and explore its capabilities, while AT&T might have finally gotten the hint about those ridiculous paper bills. Logic3 unveiled the i-Station Traveler (pictured), the first speaker dock we've seen specifically for the iPhone. While most iPod docks tend to work fine with the iPhone, the $60 Traveller is designed specifically around the horizontal orientation, allowing you to watch movies while the iPhone is docked. Meebo and Facebook both launched iPhone-specific versions of their sites, allowing you to IM your friends and stalk your exes with all the swoopy-slidey flair you'd expect. Orange continued to act all coy about potentially being Apple's partner in France, saying only that it had "no comment" on the iPhone, even as rumors heat up. The iPhone got straight-up benchmarked for the first time: Craig Hockenberry whipped out his stopwatch and discovered that Javascript in MobileSafari runs right around eighty times slower than on a 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo Mac. He also whipped up a little app using that pirate toolchain we love so much and discovered that native ARM code runs some 200 times faster than Javascript in the iPhone. Looks like that Safari sandbox might not be so "sweet" after all. AT&T seems to have decided that its vendetta against the trees of the world might be a little misplaced, and is in the process of moving to "summary billing," according to a call center employee. Either that, or they're trying to guilt people into switching to e-billing by sending out ridiculous bills. Really, that's what the email says. All in all, a pretty busy week for the iPhone -- kinda makes you wonder how much action there'll be when Apple finally releases that official SDK, eh?Read - i-Station TravelerRead - MeeboRead - FacebookRead - Orange declines to comment on the iPhoneRead - iPhone benchmarksRead - AT&T reducing paper bills[Thanks, risingsonn and The Boy Genius]
Meebo releases iPhone web app
Meebo, the reigning champion of web-based chat, has just released their entry into the iPhone app arena. I had a chance to speak with meebo's CEO, Seth Sternberg, earlier today about the release, and they truly do have a surprisingly innovating iPhone app on there hands. Simply point MobileSafari at meebo.com and the site will send you to the iPhone portal (a technique about which our own Scott McNulty had a few thoughts to share) where you can sign into any of Meebo's supported services - including AIM, Yahoo!, MSN and Google Talk - or you can sign in with an account you have already registered with meebo. From there, things get very interesting (note that the screenshot below was snapped in Camino since I'm just not cool enough to get Erica's iPhone screenshot utility up and running). First, if you registered an account with meebo and added your credentials for one or more chat networks, you'll appreciate the fact that everything transfers over to the iPhone app. Custom status messages, your buddy icon, even the history from chat sessions on your desktop computer - they all appear in the iPhone app. Your buddies are listed alphabetically, but any current chats float to the top of the buddy list for easy access, and this is a bit of UI where meebo has some unique innovation going on: the entire iPhone meebo experience centers around a home screen that is your buddy list; it takes up the entire display, and it even rotates and scales gracefully for landscape mode. No tabs here, which can be a mixed bag for the experience. Tapping on a buddy slides over to a new chat window with nothing but an icon to get back to your buddy list, a box to type in and the send button. Chat history (if there is any) populates pretty quickly, even over EDGE, which is an area that Seth said the company focused quite a bit: ensuring the entire app was light on data, simple to use and ultimately fast. Tapping the buddy list icon of course gets you back to the list, and any chats you started automatically float to the top. This is where the lack of tabs can be both a blessing and a curse: while the buddy list is nice and large, making it far easier to to read and navigate than any previous iPhone chat apps, it still takes at least two taps - not including any potential scrolling - to get out of a chat, back to the list and into another chat; more taps if you need to scroll. It's a unique approach to solving this kind of a problem, but ultimately, I think meebo made the right choice.All things considered, meebo's iPhone chat app is hands down my new favorite. I haven't been chatting much on my iPhone yet, but meebo's streamlined experience, fast load times and easy navigation make this a slam dunk that has finally sparked my interest in trying out mobile chat. I was even more surprised about how well they've done on this 1.0 app when Seth shared that this is meebo's first mobile app of any kind. While the company has done web-based chat for years now, they've never ventured onto any mobile device platforms. That said, I think they just about knocked this one out of the park. If you own an iPhone and need to chat, meebo.com is easily one of the best options available.
Using multi-network Meebo chat service on your iPhone
While Nik Fletcher at our sister site Download Squad discovered that Meebo works decently on an iPhone, it isn't without some catches. Meebo, for those who have never experienced, is a leading web-based multi-network chat service; in other words - chatting in a web browser is their business, and they've been doing it for a long time. Even though Nik is right, and Meebo might fill in for the lack of any kind of chat in the iPhone, it isn't without some UI quirks that can make the experience less than pleasing. Of course, it is entirely plausible that the Meebo team are already hard at work on getting their product to play nicely with an iPhone, but until then, I figured some tips and tricks were in order for those who are just dying to chat across AIM, Yahoo!, MSN and even ICQ on their iPhones. Save time logging in: You should probably make it easy on yourself and register a Meebo account with a real desktop browser. While you always have the option of manually signing into one or more services each time you visit Meebo, if you want to chat on more than one network, it's going to be a pain in the butt to keep zooming in and out while typing in your login credentials each time. From what I can tell, iSafari (Safari on the iPhone) doesn't properly save your login name and/or password, so it might simply be easier to create a Meebo account and attach all the network logins you want to it so you can simply log into all of them with one master Meebo account. The buddy list works - mostly: I'm no web 2.0 designer, but from what I can tell, Meebo is a pretty complex web-based chat app. Since Meebo is providing some pretty powerful functionality, I'm not surprised that it doesn't work quite right in iSafari, and the quirky buddy list is probably the first thing you'll notice. If you try to tap on any contacts, the entire buddy list gets that dark translucent overlay as if you just tapped on and selected the entire thing. What's worse, you might not even see a new chat window open up, even in landscape mode. Fret not, however: for some reason, Meebo (at least on my iPhone) places new chat windows far, far to the left. If you pinch and zoom out a bit, maybe even scrolling a tad, you should see any and every new chat window you opened by tapping on the buddy list. Handling windows: Once you get over that buddy list hump, the rest of Meebo works fairly well. Tapping in the text field area of a chat window will bring up the iPhone's keyboard, and I find that, given how much space the keyboard takes up, using the iPhone in typical portrait mode (vertically) here gives you a bit more space to see what you're typing and maybe the last word or line of what your buddy said. Simply pressing the Go button in the lower right of the keyboard will actually send your chat message. While windows don't seem to be drag-able, you can tap on their title bars to bring one or the other to the front, allowing you to tap in the text field and get typing. This, of course, is all going to require you to get real comfortable with zooming in and our frequently, because the iPhone will zoom in on the text field area when you want to chat, forcing you to zoom back out to see what your buddy is saying or any other chat windows you have open. It isn't perfect, but it works. Chat junkies will likely rejoice since they won't have to burn through SMS, and Meebo offers a better experience and more chat networks than that AIM-only experimental app we found last month. Aside from waiting for Apple to get on the ball here, keep your eyes on Meebo, as I would not be surprised if they're working on optimizing their web app for the iPhone.
