Meebo

» see meebo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

meebo went live in september 2005, built by sandy jen and seth sternberg with elaine wherry in palo alto. the product was a single web page that logged you into multiple instant messaging networks at once. msn messenger and aim were on it from launch, with yahoo messenger, icq, google talk, jabber, and later facebook chat layered on as the protocols opened up. there was no installer to download and no admin rights needed. you opened a browser tab, signed in, and your full buddy list across every protocol you used was sitting there in one window. for a generation of users on locked-down work pcs and university computers where the desktop clients were blocked at the firewall, meebo was the workaround.

the company expanded into community products on top of the chat core. meebo rooms launched in may 2007 as advertising-supported group chat that supported up to 80 people in a single room. the meebo bar arrived around 2009 as an embeddable strip that publishers could add to their sites for chat and sharing. by 2011 the meebo bar was running on a long list of major media properties, and reported monthly active users across the bar surface reached around 250 million. it was at this point one of the most widely loaded third-party widgets on the open web that anybody outside its actual user base had never heard of.

google acquired meebo on june 4, 2012 for a reported figure near 100 million dollars. the announcement said the meebo team would join the google+ effort. the google+ effort did not need a multi-protocol chat aggregator. it needed a unified social product, and the meebo team was redirected into that bigger goal. on july 11, 2012, just over a month after the acquisition, google shut down meebo messenger and most of the other consumer-facing products in a single sweep. the meebo bar was kept on for the publisher integrations and finally retired on june 6, 2013. the brand was gone within a calendar year of being purchased.

i used meebo around 2007 to 2009. msn messenger was still the main thing on every machine i had at home, but at university computer labs the desktop client was blocked at the firewall, and meebo was what you opened in a browser tab to keep talking to whoever was online during a long lab hour. the trick was opening it in firefox so you could close the window without losing your sign-in state. meebo was not a service you went to as a destination. it was the layer on top of all the other services that made the browser into a messenger when nothing else was allowed to run.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it solved ~

the year before meebo launched, anyone who talked to friends across networks needed two or three separate desktop clients open. msn for the people on msn, aim for the people on aim, yahoo messenger for whichever third group of users your friend mix had landed on. trillian and pidgin were already on the market but they were desktop installers that needed admin rights, which most workplaces and universities did not give you. meebo's actual breakthrough was that it ran in a browser. you could be on a locked-down pc, an internet cafe, or a borrowed laptop, and as long as you had a web browser you had your full im world.

~ the meebo bar ~

the meebo bar was the financial story underneath the meebo brand most people remembered. publishers loaded the bar on their sites as a small javascript widget that gave readers a chat sidebar and social sharing buttons. by 2011 the bar was on enough major media properties that meebo was reportedly counting around 250 million monthly users across the bar surface, though most of those users had no idea they were technically meebo users. that distribution number is what made the company valuable to google. it was also what made the bar the first thing the google+ team killed in 2013, because monetizing somebody else's site traffic was not the social network strategy.

~ what google did with it ~

the google playbook with meebo was the same playbook used on jaiku, friendfeed, and a stack of other small social acquisitions in the late 2000s and early 2010s. you bought the team for what they had built, then redirected them to whatever the priority project was that quarter while the original product was left to expire. for meebo specifically the priority was google+, the social effort google ran from 2011 to 2019 in an attempt to compete with facebook. the meebo team contributed to google+ and to google hangouts. neither product is alive in 2026. the meebo team scattered in the years after, with the founders going on to start other companies. the brand itself never came back.

~ what it left ~

the closest thing to meebo today is a web-based all-in-one client like beeper or texts.com, which solve the same multi-protocol chat problem from a desktop and mobile angle instead of a browser tab. nothing in the current market sits exactly where meebo sat, because the protocols themselves are mostly gone. msn shut down in 2013, aim followed in 2017, yahoo messenger went in 2018, and icq finally shut down in 2024. the messengers meebo aggregated died on a slow timeline of their own, and by the time anyone might have wanted a meebo-style aggregator again, there was nothing left to aggregate.

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