Meebo discontinued: shutting down on July 11, 2012

http://www.meebo.com/support/article/175/

by superasn • 14 years ago

103 101 14 years ago

meebo.com

mixmasteralan• 14 years ago

The iPhone imo app should see a surge in downloads.

eurleif2• 14 years ago

I think it will stop working too without access to their servers.

fallenhitokiri• 14 years ago

If we are all talking about imo[1] I do not believe it will stop working - at least I do not see any connection.

[1] https://imo.im/

dbh937• 14 years ago

I wonder how long it'll be until we see Meebo integrated into Android and/or Google webapps. I personally think it's sad to see Google buy a company and then shut down it's services.

sahaskatta• 14 years ago

I guess I no longer need to have an Adblock rule for the Meebo bar that appears on so many websites...

zevyoura• 14 years ago

Re-read the link; that's the only service they're keeping.

callmevlad• 14 years ago

Direct quote from their site:

> NOTE: The Meebo Bar will continue to be available to site publishers and will see continued improvements and new features in the weeks and months ahead.

DrJ• 14 years ago

now you just need one for Google bar ;)

blackysky• 14 years ago

that's a great opportunity for any meebo alternative out there because a lot of people were more then happy to use meebo...

hinathan• 14 years ago

Not enough to keep Meebo independent.

ricardobeat5• 14 years ago

What do you mean? They never asked for my money.

donzimmer• 14 years ago

I've used https://imo.im/ for a while now. No affiliation other than as a user. The service has worked well for me when I've used it in the past.

Steve_007• 14 years ago

I shift to Brosix and I think it is great free IM - http://www.brosix.com

ricardobeat5• 14 years ago

Oh, come on. Fuck this.

Can we ever trust a service to keep running for even a third of our lifetime?

fizx• 14 years ago

My favorite coffee shop shut down.

bdunn• 14 years ago

This is why I tend to use paid services. The incentive to shut down services that make money is a lot less than those that hemhorrage cash.

mibbitier4• 14 years ago

You can have mismanaged paid services that hemhorrage cash, and you can have well managed free services that are extremely profitable. I don't think there's a logical correlation.

One datapoint is the massive amount of investment they took, and the amount of time they've been going. It was obvious they'd need an exit soon.

pbreit2• 14 years ago

Not necessarily. A non-free service is unlikely to get enough traction to remain in business. And I can't think of a single paid messaging client.

omh• 14 years ago

The services that they're shutting down were all provided for free with no obvious source of significant revenue.

If you were paying them and they were making a profit then you might have a better chance.

mibbitier4• 14 years ago

> The services that they're shutting down were all provided for free with no obvious source of significant revenue.

You mean like GMail?

You would have at least thought they could integrate the MSN/AIM/Yahoo messenger etc into GMail.

mgkimsal2• 14 years ago

I haven't looked in to this particular instance, but in general...

why buy a company that has no significant revenue? It's not like it's some shock to google - "oh no, meebo doesn't make enough money!?"

So... yeah, the services were provided 'free' in some sense, but meebo was able to continue running before this. Just... yeah.. buy stuff, shut it down.

If it's not a significant source of revenue, it probably doesn't take a significant amount of cash to keep it running for another 6 months to a year.

EDIT: I should have added, I understand the logical reasoning behind buying a company for its assets/talent. Doesn't mean it's not annoying.

gcb2• 14 years ago

Why did we started talking about facebook now?

pbreit2• 14 years ago

> If you were paying them and they were making a profit then you might have a better chance.

Not necessarily. A non-free service is unlikely to get enough traction to remain alive.

anonymoushn2• 14 years ago

The entire IM client UI was one big ad. I'd be surprised if they couldn't make enough money to run the IM client by plastering a giant Best Buy elf across the screen, especially given that eBuddy makes its money in the same way.

cturner• 14 years ago

You might find this entertaining - I'm watching a speech by Alan Kay at the moment where he says that computing is more pop-culture than science: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc

mtgx2• 14 years ago

You're not serious, are you? What's the average lifetime of a company - 10 years? And since the pace of change keeps accelerating, that means the average life keeps getting shorter (used to be 15 years, etc).

ricardobeat5• 14 years ago

That it's the current unavoidable state of things doesn't make it any better.

I can't count on my fingers the number of services I considered adopting (and vouching for) that were shot down mid-flight in the past year and half. It's getting to hard to trust any business for more than short-term commitment, not just unproven ones.

erikb3• 14 years ago

Well, IRC and email might exist longer then you are old now... (guessing that a lot of people here will be around 20 years old)

ne0codex• 14 years ago

There's still reddit..

aioprisan• 14 years ago

until Google buys them too and shuts them down a month later

pixie_• 14 years ago

I guess the 'dont be evil' phase of google is long past huh.

jyap• 14 years ago

You must be new here. But seriously this is a surprisingly fast phase out with no further announcement from the new owners Google. No publicly stated alternatives or transition plan.

Karunamon2• 14 years ago

Not sure what "transition plan" they could possibly offer. They only exist as a frontend to other IM services. It takes literally 5 minutes to duplicate 10 IM accounts on another identical service (IMO,ebuddy,trillian,implus).

The only thing they had of value were the logs, and they're giving those out to download.

cldrope2• 14 years ago

I'm a skeptic, so I'm inclined to agree. At the same time I'd like to say that we should give it a bit and see where they go with it. Google hasn't been one to remove value that I'm aware of.

CYPHERDSOUL• 14 years ago

I'm curious to see how Google will integrate it into +

erikb3• 14 years ago

Will they? They already have GTalk. To me it looks like they just wanted to take out competition.

linhat• 14 years ago

Sorry for the language, but WTF GOOGLE? Meebo has been around since forever (well, actually 2005) when it was only a web messenger and used by a LOT of people whenever you couldn't or wouldn't want to install a native messaging app, or messaging was blocked on your network. I actually know people that used Meebo exactly for that reason, no installation required and furthermore if you created yourself a Meebo account, you had all your different messaging protocols available and you had logs wherever/whenever you wanted/needed them.

It makes me really sad to see this piece of internet history (if one can call it that since it's not that old) getting axed, especially getting axed by a company this big which could surely afford to keep those servers running (maybe a meebo engineer could chime in on that since I have no idea what it takes to keep these running).

Surely meebo started changing its business angle quite a while ago but I don't think they would have cut the service that made them what they are today. That said, I really hope Google keeps its fingers of ANY service I enjoyed in the past.

joering22• 14 years ago

+1. This is truly sad. One can only hope that the more Google kill, the more enterprenours will be unwilling to sell them their project (baby).

dot• 14 years ago

Let's not kid ourselves, browser based instant messaging across different protocols is not that interesting anymore. Facebook, What's App and iMessages won.

This will free up this capable team to work on something more current.

Karunamon2• 14 years ago

Honestly, there are better web messengers out there. Off the very top of my head, there's IM+ and eBuddy. Hell, even Trillian has a web version now.

ricardobeat5• 14 years ago

None of them have the polish and stability of Meebo Messenger, I don't know what criteria for "better" they excel at.

Maxious• 14 years ago

There's also Google Talk in Gmail/Google+ ;)

freshfunk• 14 years ago

I would guess that technology caught up with them.

With the penetration of smartphones, I bet that that's become a better alternative than web IM for most people.

daveying992• 14 years ago

Exactly. Too focused on having a unified IM network for the desktop web. Facebook chat took over desktop web chat. Whatsapp took over mobile app chat. And Meebo got into toolbars and sharing widgets. Their lack of product focus and subsequent sale reminds me a lot of Loopt.

bitwize• 14 years ago

To me, Meebo was a lyric in "Here Comes Another Bubble", and not much else.

I'm not sure I'd consider it a notable piece of internet history. Google, yes; Netscape, yes; Napster, yes. LinkExchange, no; AllAdvantage, no; Meebo, probably not.

kierank• 14 years ago

Good, I've hated the meebo overlay since day 1.

joering22• 14 years ago

Would you care to say why?

Achshar• 14 years ago

I don't like anything with a fixed position with sole purpose of sharing to social networks. Looks very desperate and blocks the precious vertical pixels. I don't mid fixed stuff on the side of the content, but an overlay you can't scroll off? an immediate turn off.

notatoad• 14 years ago

bad news: that part of meebo isn't going anywhere.

kevinsd• 14 years ago

Now that Meebo found an exit, they ditch IM users who the acquiring company, Google, does not care either.

Nobody could be blamed. But perhaps one thing meebo could do is to coordinate with meebo messenger alternatives to help users to switch.

Personally I use imo.im. I hope it can stay long and focused. At least so far it has a very IM-focused name. :)

sakopov2• 14 years ago

When Meebo announced getting bought out my response was:

"Nice, generic and overenthusiastic post-acquisition blog post. They'll likely be shutdown within a few months."

Turns out i was off by a few months in my prediction. I still don't understand what Google acquired through this purchase.

citricsquid3• 14 years ago

> NOTE: The Meebo Bar will continue to be available to site publishers and will see continued improvements and new features in the weeks and months ahead.

Answers your question, doesn't it? Google acquired them for the Meebo bar; I would put money on it being acquired to become google+ified.

Edit: seems I was incorrect and they were acquired for the team. Disregard this comment.

sakopov2• 14 years ago

But you see that was my point. I don't think there is a team or a good product to acquire here. It hardly compares to previous Google's acquisitions.

ksat• 14 years ago

I kind of don't get it. Why do big companies buy other successful companies just to shut it down? Can't they just rebrand it or something? If they can't why even buy? Just for acquiring the technical talent?

tyrmored• 14 years ago

That, and heading off future competition. If Google were planning, for example, on releasing a multi-protocol web chat application of their own in the next few weeks, this would be a well-timed move.

Using Meebo's code base to make their own application might have been preferable to rebranding it in this case.

mrchess• 14 years ago

What is with all the hate? Meebo tried, tried again, they failed, so they exited.

1. Meebo Messenger was great, but was not pulling in nearly enough revenue

2. Meebo tried to pivot to an advertising bar for more revenue with no luck

Understand that Google probably didn't buy Meebo with the intent of shutting its services. Meebo was most likely already failing (hence the 70MM overall raise and 100MM exit), and would have had to shut down anyway. However the founders were, luckily, able to exit the company first.

Meebo was great at its peak, but Google didn't kill Meebo. It was already dead.

saumil07• 14 years ago

Indeed. The Meebo Product/Eng team by all accounts was excellent. Same for the exec team. At the end of the day they were bitten by the same things Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger figured out a long time ago. Monetizing IM is hard.

But at least they had the gumption to "go for it". Respect.

cldrope2• 14 years ago

Definitely. I hope someone figures out an unintrusive way to monetize IM services so we can see a variety of inspired IM clients/platforms instead of the same dingy things repeated.

citricsquid3• 14 years ago

Huh, so if Meebo is already "dead" why did Google buy Meebo? Google bought Meebo last week!

Surely the conclusion from this is that Google bought Meebo FOR the Meebo bar, not that the Meebo bar has failed. The Meebo bar product is the one they're continuing!

tptacek• 14 years ago

The fact that Google believes it may be able to derive value from the Meebo bar product does not mean that Meebo was in a position to derive similar value at a palatable level of risk.

brandnewlow• 14 years ago

Google has a precedent of buying up startups that "discover" and conquer a new piece of mainstream media web sites.

They bought Feedburner way back in 2007 because they'd come to own RSS feeds at almost all the major publishers.

Now they're buying Meebo because that will let them own the toolbar across the bottom of lots of major publishers...where they will certainly start surfacing Google + bullcrap that no one wants to see.

bpm1402• 14 years ago

Google bought Meebo for the team, not the product.

mtgx2• 14 years ago

I'm actually surprised they chose Meebo over Ebuddy, which I've preferred over Meebo for many years (lately it has also become a bit too bloated, so I've been using imo.im). But maybe Google knows something I don't about the Meebo team.

Only the most important and biggest tech companies we can expect to still "be alive" for more than a decade from now, maybe 2. Most of the others should disappear within a decade, and I think that goes for Facebook, too, unless they produce something revolutionary over the next few years.

anonymoushn2• 14 years ago

They bought the Meebo Bar, the team, or both. While other IM aggregators are better, the IM aggregator was not the point.

jmount• 14 years ago

Meebo bar was truly nasty.

nirajd• 14 years ago

does anyone see a trend? startups' general exit is through acquisition. how can you secure customers when your potential users know that some day, your marginal revenues will require you to exit through acquisition? services getting shutdown shortly after..

johnrob2• 14 years ago

While most exits are indeed via acquisition, very few startups actually exit.

huhtenberg• 14 years ago

So Google cuts a head off a popular multi-protocol IM client. I wonder why.

jaysonelliot• 14 years ago

My first thought was "this is sad news for users of their great IM client, but at least it means no more Meebo Bar."

Then I read: NOTE: The Meebo Bar will continue to be available to site publishers and will see continued improvements and new features in the weeks and months ahead.

So, basically, the worst of both worlds.

heretohelp• 14 years ago

Meebo Bar makes money and maintains a number of partnerships that are useful.

The IM client does not.

erikb3• 14 years ago

sometimes it's so good to listen to your feeling. I switched from meebo to other chat services very, very long ago.

wedesoft• 14 years ago

IMO Meebo for Android is a really good multi-protocol chat client. A bit like the Pidgin free software for the desktop.

Macha• 14 years ago

Meebo for iPhone was a good app. Meebo for Android was garbage, unless they updated it last year. It had basically no features. I used it when I first got my phone as it was a name I recognised, but later switched to imo, which is a much better app.

mudrast• 14 years ago

I think that in less than one year we will have a Google+ bar... They bought the bar and the team to integrate Google+ on every website. Google Friendconnect bar + Meebo bar = Google+ bar.

user49598• 14 years ago

Bummer, was a super useful service. Would be a great benefit to society if they open sourced the messenger.

Meebo discontinued: shutting down on July 11, 2012

Related Stories