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Meebo discontinued: shutting down on July 11, 2012
- mixmasteralan 14y agoThe iPhone imo app should see a surge in downloads.
- eurleif 14y agoI think it will stop working too without access to their servers.
- fallenhitokiri 14y agoIf 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/ https://imo.im/
- eurleif 14y agoOh, my bad. I took 'imo' as 'in my opinion', and thought the comment was implying lots of people would rush to download Meebo's app before it's discontinued.
- dbh937 14y agoI 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 14y agoI guess I no longer need to have an Adblock rule for the Meebo bar that appears on so many websites...
- zevyoura 14y agoRe-read the link; that's the only service they're keeping.
- callmevlad 14y agoDirect 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 14y agonow you just need one for Google bar ;)
- blackysky 14y agothat's a great opportunity for any meebo alternative out there because a lot of people were more then happy to use meebo...
- hinathan 14y agoNot enough to keep Meebo independent.
- ricardobeat 14y agoWhat do you mean? They never asked for my money.
- mibbitier 14y agoSomething makes me think what with the amount of investment they got, their aim was an exit, rather than anything to do with customers or users.
- donzimmer 14y agoI've used https://imo.im/ 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 14y agoI shift to Brosix and I think it is great free IM - http://www.brosix.com http://www.brosix.com
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ricardobeat 14y agoOh, come on. Fuck this. Can we ever trust a service to keep running for even a third of our lifetime?
- fizx 14y agoMy favorite coffee shop shut down.
- bdunn 14y agoThis 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.
- mibbitier 14y agoYou 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.
- pbreit 14y agoNot 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.
- jakejake 14y agoI think going into messaging at all would be extremely risky and you'd need to have a really fantastic product and a clever business plan to make it profitable. The space is already dominated by free options - all of which are funded by giant companies that make their revenue on other products. The only paid client I know of is Trillian Pro. They've been around for quite a while but I have a feeling it's a small company with low overhead. It would be interesting to know what percentage of their revenue comes from the paid pro version vs the ad-supported free version.
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- ne0codex 14y agoThere's still reddit..
- aioprisan 14y agountil Google buys them too and shuts them down a month later
- pixie_ 14y agoI guess the 'dont be evil' phase of google is long past huh.
- jyap 14y agoYou 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.
- Karunamon 14y agoNot 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.
- cldrope 14y agoI'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 14y agoI'm curious to see how Google will integrate it into +
- erikb 14y agoWill they? They already have GTalk. To me it looks like they just wanted to take out competition.
- linhat 14y agoSorry 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.
- joering2 14y 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 14y agoLet'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.
- mibbitier 14y agoLet's not kid ourselves. Millions of people use instant messaging daily. Facebook in no way "won".
- daveying99 14y agoPoll: when's the last time you logged in to MSN/AOL/Yahoo Messenger?
- kierank 14y agoGood, I've hated the meebo overlay since day 1.
- joering2 14y agoWould you care to say why?
- Achshar 14y agoI 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 14y agobad news: that part of meebo isn't going anywhere.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- kevinsd 14y agoNow 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. :)
- sakopov 14y agoWhen 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.
- citricsquid 14y 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.
- sakopov 14y agoBut 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.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ksat 14y agoI 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 14y agoThat, 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 14y agoWhat 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 14y agoIndeed. 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.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- cldrope 14y agoDefinitely. 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.
- citricsquid 14y agoHuh, 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 14y agoThe 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.
- nirajd 14y agodoes 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..
- johnrob 14y agoWhile most exits are indeed via acquisition, very few startups actually exit.
- huhtenberg 14y agoSo Google cuts a head off a popular multi-protocol IM client. I wonder why.
- startupcto 14y agoIt was an acqu-hire exit and was for $25m.
- jaysonelliot 14y agoMy 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 14y agoMeebo Bar makes money and maintains a number of partnerships that are useful. The IM client does not.
- erikb 14y agosometimes it's so good to listen to your feeling. I switched from meebo to other chat services very, very long ago.
- wedesoft 14y agoIMO Meebo for Android is a really good multi-protocol chat client. A bit like the Pidgin free software for the desktop.
- Macha 14y agoMeebo 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 14y agoI 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 14y agoBummer, was a super useful service. Would be a great benefit to society if they open sourced the messenger.