I would hope that the whispers become reality as a lot of these startups seemingly disappear most of the time. I am currently using a great program in beta called http://www.TailsHQ.com and I am using it for mission critical bug reporting. The unfortunate thing is that they still don’t have an option for me to pay to include more team members. I think minus 1-2 features and payment options it is a very solid app bug reporting application.

lol. Thanks for the advertisement…err…comment, Ken. TailsHQ doesn’t have *anything* to do with the post at hand (i.e. Instant Messaging). It was a valiant attempt to jump from that post to your site (or whoever’s it is) by making a reference to “stealth startups”. Your comment should be considered spam. Everyone boycott it! lol

These startups should bring something innovative and actually useful. All they are doing is copycat other startups and add their logo and GUI.

Competition for what, dorkiest name for a website?

Marshall, your blog’s been blocking my comments consistently. What gives?

It looks pretty cool. Im curious to how it is.

Thanks Ginchy for saying what many surely must be thinking.

Meebo and Wablet?

I wonder if Mike ever looks at the names in his post titles and wonders:

“I gave up the practice of law for this?”

Whoops, sorry Marshall, but you likely feel the same way.

Sasha, you’re the second person who’s said that. I’m going to have to look into it. Sorry about that.

Brian, no worries - law vs. Meebletoos and such is an existential question anyone could spend hours pondering

I love how Mike Abundo, an unknown uncredited Philipiane blogger is the authority on what will blow away Meebo. From looking at his blog, he has every insentive to promote any start-up form the Philipianes. Marshal can you please explain what makes Wablet so special… what are the rumors that you heard? Based on the name, and the copycat logo that I have seen so many times, there appears to be nothing special about this company.

It’s the Philippines, dumbonic.

Meebo’s closed alpha isn’t out yet, but I’ve seen its features in development. What MeeboMe offers is a mere subset of what I’ve seen.

I use Meebo on my site, and it works pretty well. There are a couple options I’d love them to add, but all in all it just works. Which is what you’d want.

Is it essential? No, it’s more in the toy stage. My site is a sorta newsblog, and I just threw it up so that people can suggest articles, and or comment directly to me.

Maybe Wablet can be even MORE free and less revenue-generating than Meebo? OH, wait, that ain’t possible.

Mike Abundo, why don’t you be more specific. Meebo plans to add group chat and more. What is it that Wablet plans to add? And is wablet doing only IM? Give us more if you want us to believe it is going to “blow away meebo”

meebome will not show presence if you load a page with the widget in when using IE6 Period.. i am logged into my meebo account with firefox, but when looking at the widget in IE it says I am not online.. It works fine in Opera 9… hmmmmm

I have to admire you, Marshall. Takes a lot of guts to write a sentence like, “Meebo to face more competition from stealth startup Wablet.” I had to fight down a spontaneous reaction to throw my laptop across the room.

Thanks Shelley, it’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it. (?)

Sorry, it’s the words. It’s like a trick question: Use ‘meebo’, ’stealth’, and ‘wablet’ in a system.

Wablet. Is that like, “That wascally wablet!”

I’m not sure I can handle anymore uber cute Web 2.0 words.

Sorry, use in a ’sentence’. See? Web 2.0 cognitive dysfunction disease, or Web 2.- CDD. Makes you drop vowels and make up meaningless words. Can only see in gradients. Call a 29 year old ‘kid’. That sort of thing.

i’m willing to give Wablet the benefit of the doubt. who knows? maybe it’ll indeed be better than meebo or any of the other similar IM services.

but still, Mike Abundo, even if it were true that Wablet will “blow away meebo,” it’s still kinda risky and inappropriate to say something like that. there are many products with better feature-sets that didn’t “blow away” their competition due to a number of other factors (e.g. marketing, customer service, etc.).

I agree with the 37Signals guys that it’s not what you put into a product, it’s what users can get out of it, but reading this post makes me wonder what the threshold is for making it on TechCrunch:

“the company was hiring a senior web developer and Datacenter/Linux Administrator for their US location in May.”

Wow! They’re hiring two people in the US! (unless they were looking for a twofer - it’s not exactly clear). Our company is also hiring - can we be featured too?

Here’s a proposal: How about TechCrunch only mention products that actually exist? I’m so sick of the pattern: OMG great new product. Psych! it’s private beta. Wait for months. Underwhelming, feature-free launch.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Seriously? Can someone explain why so much of TC’s content relates to vaporware?

So if anyone is interested, I did some investigative work on Wablet. This is what I have established thus far.

here is a link to the wablet app client beta -

http://launcher.wablet.com/squ.....wf?apid=11

(note: if you change the value of teh ‘apid=’ to different numbers like ‘apid=15′ you will find you can access their entire user base - i think it’s around thrity users. You will also notice that there are names of some German developers in there - ostensibly checking it out for use on their social network sites)

The above link happens to be for the chairman of ‘There Philippines’ the parent company of ‘GroveNet’. GroveNet is the MySpace/Freindster of the Philippines. ‘There Philippines’ is developing this little IM app to gain access to MySpace/Friendsters (and others) user base like a little cancer droid. It’s an interesting attempt to steal this user base. It will directly compete with Meebo and from what I can tell is not any where near as established or user friendly as Meebo.

Just another copy cat attempt for global domination - go figure!!!

Thanks Saint, I’ll ask the company about this when I see their demo soon

Good luck with that Marshall. The way I see it is ‘There Philippines’ chairman David Foote and GrooveNets President Greg Kittelson are in kahoots on this one and having this developed through FBM Software in SF and the Philippines - Badongers Martinez (http://www.badongers.com/blog/) is leading the charge in the Philippines and Danny Santos is putting a little team together in San Francisco through FBM as seen here (http://www.jobvertise.com/job/4865750.html). I found so much info on these guys just under the surface - that I would hardly use the word ’stealth’ as they describe themselves The article below details some clues of there competitive intentions towards mySpace and Friendster and locally competing social networks http://technology.inq7.net/inf.....e_id=13770

Sascha Weyers http://www.weyers.ws also at http://launcher.wablet.com/squ.....wf?apid=42 seems to be involved in this development. I could be wrong but this seems to be the case. On a similar note my investigations revealed a new stealth company that seems to be have a communication platform in development and appears to comprise of ex-people from myspace, skype, ebay called incircles - haven’t heared to much but understand that some big VCs are backing it. This is the link i found - http://www.incircles.com/ would like to know more

“The Saint”: I visited Groovenet yesterday, and got a look at Wablet’s newest user interface (and interface customization) features. They make Meebo’s interface look like a cave drawing. Michael Arrington expects competition between AJAX and Flash in Web 2.0; expect Flash to win this bout.

Heck, the interface isn’t even the secret sauce — which is so good, I can’t even elaborate on it yet. Oh, and what you call a “cancer droid” is what Steve Rubel calls picture-in-picture marketing.

Oh, and enjoy the demo, Marshall. It’s fun.

Some more info on Wablet…

i will stick with koolim.

anyone know when this will be launched anyway?

i guess the big worry is personal data. meebome is enough for me for this kind of thing, i also use koolim at work because meebo is blocked.

eBuddy is world wide the most popular service (check Alexa). I prefer the eBuddy user interface as well, it looks more like MSN/Yahoo/AIM to me.

Those Kool IM and Meebo blog spammers can shut up now!

I agree with Bob that of all web based IM services eBuddy feels the most like ‘the real thing’. I think I’ll stick to eBuddy. I don’t feel like using wablets or talking to strangers on my website!

koolim, they should make thier service and site fater though.

I prefer koolim and meebo, meebo needs more specific features while koolim needs more scaling.

what did ever happen to this wablet stuff anyway?

Hopefully by this time David Foote is now paying taxes for his employees

who is david foote?

who is david?

still no beta links

Wablet Sucks…. David Foote Sucks Dick