We just received word that tonight at 9pm PT Flixster will roll out its integration of Meebo Community IM, which adds instant messaging-like chat functionality to any website.

Out of 19 total launch partners, a couple more will push their implementations live over the next two weeks, then a large batch of partners will launch theirs in early 2009. We don’t have any word yet on which partners will be next and exactly when they plan to launch.

Watch a demo video of Flixster’s integration below:

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Movies.app was created by Jeffrey Grossman, a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon University. The application lets users find show times, watch trailers and get maps to local theaters and has been downloaded 250,000 times. Flixster has updated the app to give users full access to their database of 70,000 movies, so users will be able to look up older titles while at Blockbuster, etc. In the next version users will also be able to link their Flixter accounts to the application.

Grossman will join Flixster as an consultant while attending school. He just got a heck of a resume bump.

Flixster itself continues to do well. They’ve presumably recovered from the IAC acquisition train wreck that occurred a year ago (IAC reportedly walked away from a nearly closed deal). According to Comscore Flixster now has 6.5 million monthly visitors to its website and 13.6 million across its network (website plus Facebook and MySpace apps). They’re at about 250 million monthly page views if you include the Facebook/MySpace apps.

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Today is definitely Facebook day as they hold their second annual F8 developers conference in San Francisco. Last year they released their developer platform, which led competitors to hurriedly release their own competing offerings. What’s in store for tomorrow? We’ve made our predictions, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes the stage at 1:30 to make his keynote, and workshops will follow all day after that. The full schedule is here.

Some of the news is breaking early. For example, we will almost certainly see the Facebook payments platform launch in some form, for example – Facebook desperately wants to find a way to help application developers make money beyond advertising, and the iPhone App Store has shown that people are willing to pay for quality applications.

Even more certain is the launch of Facebook Connect, which will allow third party services to authenticate Facebook users and merge profile data into their offerings. Digg will be one of their launch partners, and will show off the new product on stage, say our sources. However, neither CEO Jay Adelson or Founder Kevin Rose will attend the event.

We’ve also heard from sources that Facebook will announce a tiering system for applications, confirming our previous post in March. Five to ten top tier apps, which have proven themselves trustworthy and which create as good or better a user experience as what Facebook is able to create itself, will be named in the near future. iLike (music) and Causes (charity) will be announced tomorrow, and more will come soon. We heard that Flixster (movies) was on the short list but was bumped at the last minute – perhaps due to their MySpace partnership announced yesterday.

Other apps will be grouped into a middle tier, where most of them will fall, and a bottom “unwashed masses” tier for untrustworthy or spammy apps that have little user value. Each tier will have different rules for engaging with users, particularly around invites, messaging and entry into the news feed.

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The first is confirmation of our story that they are supporting OpenID, although they aren’t releasing any details (It’s our belief that they will first issue OpenID IDs, and possibly become a relying party later).

The company is also announcing the launch of two new Data Availability integrations: Flixster and Eventful (we built what we believe is the first Data Availability app last month).

MySpace is also making a core policy change to Data Availability. Previously third party services were not allowed to store any MySpace user profile information at all – they simply requested it from MySpace, used it to create a web page and then dumped it. Now MySpace is allowing 24-hour caches of profile information, and permanent caches of certain “core elements” of a user profile.

Screen Shots:

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New social network traffic figures released by Compete show that Fubar, billed as the “first online bar and happy hour” is the fastest growing social network, having increased its traffic by 3,272,217% over the 12 months to the end of February 2008, placing the network at 14th on the list of top 20 social networking sites (chart as shown).

Year on year MySpace hasn’t grown at all, managing to lose 1% of traffic compared to Facebook with 77% growth.

The other big gainers year on year include Ning at 4803% (sneaking in to 20th place) and Twitter with 4368%.

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Why fly the company all the way to New York just to reject them in person? It seems like the polite thing to do would have been to just tell them by phone.

The reason for the change of heart? The price, rumored to have ballooned to $200 million or more, just wasn’t supported by Flixster’s declining unique visitor numbers – Flixster went from a high of 12 million monthly uniques in May 2007 to just 6.8 million in December. And IAC chief Diller’s ongoing battle with stockholder John Malone may have caused them to be more cautious with acquisitions.

Whatever the reason, Flixster’s back on the market. With such a hefty price tag, however, they may be there for a long, long time.

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Now perhaps, those discussions are back on track. One source says the deal is done. Another says the parties have been in serious discussions over the last couple of weeks and are “very close,” but no deal has been closed. Both agree the price is over the $150 million being discussed last year, and may be as high as $200 million or more. The deal is being structured as a cash plus earnout transaction.

Flixster had an up and down year in 2007. They started off strong (”growing like a weed“) and have grown to 43 million user home pages. Traffic grew to 12 million unique worldwide visitors and 358 million page views in May. But it has fallen since then. In November, Flixster had just 8.2 million visitors and 139 million page views (source: Comscore). Over 1.2 billion movie reviews have been written by users.

Those declining visitor and page view numbers don’t seem to be a concern to IAC, according to our sources. They just like the company and its loyal users.

Flixster, based in San Francisco, raised $2 million in funding in February 2007 from Lightspeed Ventures and a number of angel investors.

I’m expecting to hear more news in the next couple of weeks. With the current information we’ve received, I put a over-under on a deal getting done with IAC at about 66%.

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What they haven’t done is launch yet another social network platform. As more and more of these platforms launch, developers have difficult choices to make. There are costs associated with writing and maintaining applications for these social networks. Most developers will choose one or two platforms and ignore the rest, based on a simple cost/benefit analysis.

Google wants to create an easy way for developers to create an application that works on all social networks. And if they pull it off, they’ll be in the center, controlling the network.

What They’re Launching

OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Hosts agree to accept the API calls and return appropriate data. Google won’t try to provide universal API coverage for special use cases, instead focusing on the most common uses. Specialized functions/data can be accessed from the hosts directly via their own APIs.

Unlike Facebook, OpenSocial does not have its own markup language (Facebook requires use of FBML for security reasons, but it also makes code unusable outside of Facebook). Instead, developers use normal javascript and html (and can embed Flash elements). The benefit of the Google approach is that developers can use much of their existing front end code and simply tailor it slightly for OpenSocial, so creating applications is even easier than on Facebook.

Applications can have full functionality on profile and/or canvas pages, subject to the specific rules of each host. Facebook, by contrast, limits most functionality to the canvas page, allowing a widget on the profile page with limited features.

OpenSocial is silent when it comes to specific rules and policies of the hosts, like whether or not advertising is accepted or whether any developer can get in without applying first (the Facebook approach). Hosts set and enforce their own policies. The APIs are created with maximum flexibility.

Launch Partners

Partners are in two categories: hosts and developers. Hosts are the participating social networks, and include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.

Developers include Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide.

What This Means

The timing of OpenSocial couldn’t be better. Developers have been complaining non stop about the costs of learning yet another markup launguage for every new social network platform, and taking developer time in creating and maintaining the code. Someone had to build a system to streamline this (as we said in the last few sentences in this post). And Facebook-fear has clearly driven good partners to side with Google. Developers will immediately start building on these APIs to get distribution across the impressive list of hosts above.

And they’ll do it soon, too. It’s clear that the developers who arrived early to the Facebook Platform party won easy customers. Those that came later had to fight much harder. Developers found their new gold strike, and they will soon all be there, mining away.

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The San Francisco based company has had a meteoric rise since launching in January 2006, although Comscore suggests growth has stagnated over the last few months – worldwide unique visitors went from just over 12 million in May 2007 to just 8.4 million in September, a drop of about 30%. Compete and Alexa show a similar decline beginning in May, but with a subsequent full recovery and then some.

IAC’s offer, we’ve heard, may value the company at $150 million. However, IAC has a tendency to do complicated investment deals where they get a minority or majority stake in the business v. an outright acquisition. They own a majority stake College Humor/Vimeo (same parent company) and GarageGames, and a minority stake (rumored at 25%) in iLike through an investment by subsidiary Ticketmaster.

Flixster may not be very interested in a partial buyout, but interest from IAC could lead others to enter a bid, too. More on this as it develops.

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Palo Alto based Trusted Opinion offers community based product ratings and recommendations in a social networking setting. The focus is on friends recommending things to friends, such as movies and DVD’s.

The company added support for Netflix queuing in July, allowing members to port recommendations into Netflix.

Trusted Opinion has dumped the awful logo Michael noted in February, and with a some-what better new look has grown to 350,000 registered members and is adding 3,000 new members a day.

Trusted Opinion’s service overlaps with a number of other social networks and other startups including Yelp and Flixster.

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Joe Greenstein, Flixster’s CEO, told me by email that they now have ten million registered users and up to two million movie ratings completed daily (380+ million movie ratings to date). That’s a lot of (very valuable) user generated data. Comscore continues to show a sharp rise in page view and unique monthly visitors as well. Compare the charts below (U.S. user data only), which show data through February 2007, to the December stats we published in February.

There have been some complaints about Flixster’s aggressiveness in getting users to invite friends to the service as well. Like all services, they have to be careful about where they draw the line.

Flixster’s revenues will start to increase as large and highly relevant movie marketing budgets start to really focus on this targeted audience. Fandango now claims to generate only half its revenue from ticket sales, the rest coming from advertising and other sources. Comscore says Flixster is already bigger than Fandango, and moving in the right direction v. IMDB (see last table below).

LightSpeed Ventures was very smart to invest in this company, which is still just seven people. They are now hiring three more. If you’re looking for a job in San Francisco, apply. This thing has liquidity event written all over it.

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Comscore data graphs are below. They show Flixster growing from 4 million to 31 million monthly page views from March – December 2006. In that same period, unique visitors grew from 328,000 per month to just over 1 million. Comscore generally under reports younger, smaller sites, but the trend is clear.

Flixster is still a small social network, but the growth trends are way up and to the right. Venture capitalists, not surprisingly, like to see this in a potential investment.

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There are also rumors that major studios got involved in the Flixster bidding as well, either as an investment or an outright acquisition.

Look for an announcement in the coming weeks.

Update: Comments from founders in the comments (on their way to Aruba apparently) confirming the deal, and traffic stats in this post.

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