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November 20, 2007

Meebo’s Got Game

Michael Arrington

38 comments »

If you’re looking for a killer app on the Internet and are unwilling to get into pornography, gaming is your best bet. So when Meebo opened their platform last month to third party developers, it was clearly only a matter of time before they let game startups in. That time has come.

Twenty games launched on the service last night, ranging from chess and checkers to Texas Hold ‘em. Launch Meebo chat, click on a friend and start a game. And of course, chat with them real-time while you do it.

Meebo’s goal is to take synchronous, real time events and port them, to the extent possible, to their site. The Tokbox video chat application is a natural fit, as is gaming. Now what I’d really like to see is to video chat with my dad while I lose badly to him in chess. You can’t do that yet, but it’s undoubtedly coming.

Game partners include 3rd Sense, Absolutist, AddictingGames, Clearspring Technologies, Come2Play, Gamebrew, MediaGreenhouse, Mochi Media, MyGraffitiWall, Jiggmin, Kongregate, PlayFirst, Presidio Studios, and ZeroCode. The games available now include AddictingGames’ Fratboy Unicycle Relay, Animal Puzzle, Artillery, Attack, Backgammon, Battle Pool, Blackjack, Checkers, Chess, Connect4, Go, Kongregate Racing, Match4, Music Man, Picture This!, Pirate War, Platform Racing, Reversi, Sheep Me, Sploder, Sudoku Wars, Tactics 100, Texas Hold ‘em, and World Travel Puzzle.

Details on Meebo below.

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Meebo
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 5:55 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Allen Stern

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:01 am

    Cute title. What an impressive lineup of game creators! Meebo has really been innovating this past month.

    Last night in NYC - a new web im presented called RadiusIM - pretty interesting - uses location based google maps mashups to find new friends near where you are. Click my name for the presentation notes.

    I could see Meebo or eBuddy acquiring RadiusIM.

  2. Yakov

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:03 am

    Great move! Built-in games are going to make their service much stickier and gives opportunities to sell in-game ads.

  3. Michael Woo

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:06 am

    I see that the games are pretty interesting :) esp the card one - I bet that they have agreat future ahead if they keep up with this..

    I would definitely spend sometime playing these games..

  4. Mayank Kumar

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:39 am

    I think one can say that Meebo is trying to be a centerplace for real time activities. And they are set up for it with having a load of chat users and an open platform which can launch games in their space. Meebo has been growing nicely and steadily, and I bet my money on them :)

  5. Paul Irish

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:46 am

    One word: Scrabulous.

  6. Andy Gongea

    November 20th, 2007 at 6:58 am

    Meebo is the choice for the moment in the online IM market and maybe in the desktop market too. By releasing a simple extension to firefox and this new game feature - Meebo will become a powerful competitor to Yahoo AIM and MSN

  7. JustMo

    November 20th, 2007 at 7:06 am

    Freakin’ awesome. I love meebo and want to have it’s babies.

  8. Is there a monthly fee?

    November 20th, 2007 at 7:24 am

    I think meebo is free, and advertising to people playing games while chatting has to be one of the most difficult things I can think of. Are there ads between matches? Sponsored games? I’m just curious how they continue once their funding runs out? Anyone know?

  9. Mark Hendrickson

    November 20th, 2007 at 7:54 am

    Damn, no scrabble!

  10. 42mb.com

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:35 am

    Who has time to play game online in multiple IM system, alternatively meebo could have thought to provided users some more features.

  11. Torsten

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:49 am

    What about standards? There are games which use Jabber for multiplayer experience, like chess park. You can use any jabber-account you want.

    Will it be possible to play against meebo costumers without getting an meebo account?

  12. SaVvmari.com

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:51 am

    Nice. Soon we won’t need to interact with humans at all.

    http://savvmari.com

  13. Garth

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:51 am

    If I am already patching messinger to remove ads and games, why would I want an online IM client with ads and games?

    Sometimes it is pretty clear that the simplicity part of web 2.0 goes out the window to get those ad views.

  14. Ollie Parsley

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:03 am

    It is great to see Meebo adding awesome new tools. Would there be a point in them doing some sort of AIR product so they can get eh best of both worlds, web and desktop?

    Ollie

  15. Phillip

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:10 am

    Meebo? Lord, who has time to use a dedicated client? All my IM go through one client on my desktop. Sorry, unless the multi-chat clients (Trillian, Adium, Pidgen) support it, it isn’t going to happen for me.

  16. Michael Perrotto

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:18 am

    The Pirate War! game by MediaGreenhouse is a really cool twist on the classic war card game. I could see myself spending my lunch hour playing it. :-)

  17. John

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:19 am

    So Meebo’s got game? Great, well all the major IMs have had it for a long time, and even provided access to third-party developers. The only innovation here is they’ve done it without the client. Forgive me for being slow, but I fail to grasp the innovation here. As the saying goes, “le plus ca change…”

  18. whoopie

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:22 am

    online checkers with chat?

    yahoo did that in 1998, as did too many sites to even bother enumerating. this is a ten-year-old market

    BOOOORIIIING

  19. Scrabulous and Video Chat **Please***

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:38 am

    I actually did this last week using Tokbox and Scrabulous separately, but it was a little clunky. When it’s all seamlessly integrated into meebo, that will great. Textchat with games might be old news (@18), but this certainly isn’t..

  20. Scrabulous and Video Chat **Please***

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:39 am

    “be great”

  21. Chris R.

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:49 am

    “If you’re looking for a killer app on the Internet and are unwilling to get into pornography”

    What exactly does this mean?
    What “killer app”s are there for pornography?

    Please clarify for the reading public.

  22. jur

    November 20th, 2007 at 9:53 am

    it won’t let me play because the letter combination ‘f a g’ is in the middle of my aim name. thanks nazis!

  23. Darren Stuart

    November 20th, 2007 at 10:26 am

    this is cool but most IM clients already do this.

  24. Jonathan

    November 20th, 2007 at 1:03 pm

    I think this app is lacking of a leverage feature, something more than games that could make web-based chat really interesting.

  25. steve soloman

    November 20th, 2007 at 5:26 pm

    they made a similar announcements in the music space a few months ago. went out with lots of partners. go see how many of those music sites succeeded with integrated chat. sorry but i can’t get too excited about this.

  26. Moe Glitz

    November 21st, 2007 at 5:58 am

    Isn’t Meebo the OpenIM Platform.
    I’m pretty sure that Google must be watching, especially as Google Talk is not an IM Leader.

  27. Erik Schwartz

    November 21st, 2007 at 7:12 am

    Looks like the first version of Y! Games we launched way back when…

    Been there, done that, still have the t-shirt.

    Now add video conferencing to texas hold ‘em and you’d really have something. Online poker with bluffing and tells would make a much better experience.

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