Last month meebo, the web-based chat startup that supports nearly every IM protocol, announced that it had added support for both MySpace and Facebook Chat. Meebo’s post on the new features was a little strange – while they explicitly thanked “the folks at MySpace who encouraged and helped us to test and gave us their support”, there was no such mention of any support from Facebook’s side (instead, thanks went out to Eion Robb, who created a Facebook Chat Plugin for Pidgin). And while it’s easy to assume that Facebook was simply unwilling to help meebo, it turns out that meebo never asked, knowing full well that any changes Facebook made later on could break what they’d built.
Tonight Meebo is announcing that they’re removing support for Facebook Chat. From the company’s post on the change:
We have been speaking to the Facebook team, and it turns out, they’d like us to connect to their network in a different way. In the interim, they asked us take Facebook off Meebo, and we said “okay.”
However, we were glad to hear that the Facebook team was genuinely excited to see their network on Meebo, especially since they already have plans to open Facebook Chat. They also committed resources from their Chat and Facebook Connect teams to do extra work with us to get Facebook Chat back on Meebo “really, really soon.”
While it’s easy to point the finger at Facebook over this (the company is known for being litigious when someone implements an unauthorized use of its services), it sounds like Meebo is at fault. COO Martin Green says that while the company did reach out to MySpace, it chose to implement the Pidgin plugin without Facebook’s consent (the plugin has been used successfully on a number of native chat clients without any complaints from Facebook, though it isn’t Facebook-approved).
However, unlike these native chat clients, meebo is based on a web site and is exposed to different security risks. Facebook believed that some of these could have directly put its users at risk, which is why it asked meebo to hold off until the two companies could work together to create a secure implementation of Facebook Chat.
Of course it’s possible that meebo is offering this explanation in the hopes of smoothing things over with Facebook and avoiding litigation or being cut off from the service altogether, but it sounds like this was just a case of buggy code.
Update: A Facebook employee comments below that there was no litigation issue and that Facebook would just like to get meebo to use Chat in a way that is fully supported (we should note that the employee’s views may not represent those of the company’s).
Update 2: The original version of this article attributed Meebo’s comments to CEO Seth Sternberg, but we actually spoke to COO Martin Green. We’ve corrected the post.
dang… only reason I had to go back to meebo cause I hate facebooks browser version and no one uses myspace chat least on my friends list… darn
Nooooo!! I have to go back to work on monday and this was the thing that was going to get me through the ridiculous IT lockdown at work (we can go on facebook, but the inbox and chat is blocked)
Saying that it seems to be working just fine for me still.
you can still use Nimbuzz.com for Facebook. They also have a webchat.
TnX dude, Nimbuzz works great!
I work at Facebook and don’t think that there was any litigation issue at work here. The real explanation is more mundane:
After Facebook released Chat, we were just much busier with other things (stabilizing chat, which is much harder than you’d expect when you go from 0 to 100MM+ users in a month or so, cleaning up the new Facebook redesign and making speed improvements to the site, etc) that the project to release XMPP support received relatively little dedicated engineering time. In the meantime, the “unauthorized” plugin was released and since we were planning on principle to open access to Chat anyhow, there was no reason to try and shut them down (or obfuscate any of the protocol) but on the other hand we weren’t going to actively endorse it either.
Fast forward to now: we’ve finally gotten time to get some work on XMPP done, so we reached out to let them know they can use the real thing. We like Meebo; there is no problem there.
(this post does not necessarily represent the views of the company or its legal positions)
hooray for xmpp!
Meebo the largest web based IM service, the company is on rampage and has taken the web by storm. But Microsoft has already announced support for Facebook, Windows Live going to be integrate for Facebook, Microsoft got better technology than Meebo and the best of all the its got huge online reach and massive infrastructure so its just OK if Meebo not support Facebook chat .
Well as long as there are no ridiculous lawsuits going around and both companies have agreed to work on this together, we can wait.
facebook is owned by the cia, thus any in/outgoing communications must be under their control!
Yup, good point. With the CIA behind you hard not to lose. Not many people know this tiny little fact about facebook.
Oh well now the CIA can track everyone’s IM as well…God Help Us
Regardless of what happens with facebook chat, can anyone explain to me how meebo will ever make money? I have never gotten a clear answer to this.
Any comments here or on my blog article about this question would be greatly appreciated.
http://smartbab...armes-race.html
As far as I can see Meebo has only two options to make money.
1. Sell ads along the same lines as MSN Messenger or other IMs do. But then you would have the issue of the originator IMs ( msn, yahoo, aol etc ) not being happy about Meebo making money off their products and they would shut Meebo accessing their chat applications pretty quickly.
2. Other option which is the most obvious is Meebo still believes in the Hype Ala page views being the order of the day. Much like no Widget company is going to be bought or IPO because they lack revenue I think Meebo would die quickly since they have page views but no way to many profit.
Mikael, per #1. What if Meebo shared ad revenue with said IM carriers?
myspace chat dus not have a lot people use it so i think it was a waste of time even adding it
to “me” and “justin”…..you two should join the tin hat club—-
C’mon Face Book!!.. be COOL for ONCE!!!
Yes, you’re right
Thank you
Facebook sucks. the only reason there doing this is because they don’t want a free internet. They want profits and show off fake date to everyone to show how big we are. Facebook great social site but its not great site for the web. Facebook is all about one thing. revenue. they want every little inch of there website to making them money in some way. A good business yes. but so was Ask.com and AOL … what happened to those multi billion dollar companies???
Got any references for your claim that Facebook is faking its numbers? That is huge if it’s true.
deleta facebook now pleas
Wow!! You guys are amazing!! I’ve been using your site since I came to college 3 1/2 years ago and haven’t had access to IM sites. Now I’m going to be using meebo even more with the addition of facebook chat (don’t have access to that here either). Thanks so much – you guys do a great job and I appreciate it.
Meebo… not that different from Adium? Just web-based.
Whenever I hear “meebo,” it sounds to me like something Jar Jar Binks would say…