The number one question you all asked after reading my last blog post about starting a business from scratch was “how do I find my co-founders?”

Great question – let’s start with a bit of self reflection:

Close your eyes and visualize your group of closest friends.

Now, think specifically about how tall (or short) they all are.

Great, now ask yourself “are all of them roughly the same height?” I’ll bet most of them are – you included.

And therein lies the problem in finding co-founders for that startup you’re dying to launch. It’s most comfortable to hang out with people like ourselves, but those are exactly the folks you probably don’t want to co-found a startup with. Seems a bit unintuitive, right? I’ll explain.

Ever since Meebo launched its Community IM feature — which lets any site integrate a chat feature that’s similar to Facebook Chat — the service has seen strong growth. But the bump the site has seen with each successive partnership over the last year pales in comparison to the growth it’s been seeing in the last few months: between August and October, Meebo has jumped from around 50 million users to over 90 million. Granted, this doesn’t mean that Meebo has 90 million people actually using the chat functionality, as every visitor to one of Meebo’s partner sites gets counted as a hit. But Meebo’s interactive ads are still being shown to each of these 90 million users regardless of if they’re signed in, and the ads have been drawing an impressive 1%+ click rate.

This guest post was written by Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg. It is the first in a series of posts he’s writing about the decisions a young entrepreneur needs to make when she/he is first starting a business. The timing is perfect, there is more than a little overlap with Vivek Wadhwa’s guest post on venture capital earlier today. We’ll update this post with links to his further installments.

I was one of those kids who just couldn’t stop trying to start a company. I think I just really feared working for the Man. Problem was, I seemed to suck at the whole startup thing. Multiple attempts followed by multiple failures. At some point I just said, “screw it, I’ll get a high paying job.” Problem was, I couldn’t stop thinking of the next great thing that got me ridiculously excited. Turns out, it wasn’t so much that I was the problem. Rather, I didn’t have anyone around me familiar enough with startups to tell me that I was doing it all wrong.

Skype has been in the news a lot lately. Over the past six months, rumors swirled that the peer-to-peer telephony service provider was going to be bought back from eBay by its original founders, to be spun off as a separate company and then IPO, and ultimately to be sold to an investor group (which was confirmed at the beginning of this month). Now Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis through their Joltid holding are suing eBay and the new buyers over copyright issues centered around core p2p technology they developed and own.

The rumors just won’t stop.

This time, however, it’s about the company’s product strategy rather than its general fate. A well-placed source tells me Skype management is actively shopping around for companies that provide web-based communication services such as browser-based calling and video chats.

The idea of adding a social network to any site is a compelling one. Currently, most sites do this by creating their own networks using service like Facebook Groups and Ning. But those obviously aren’t actually your own site, they are other sites set up under your site’s name. Stribe’s goal is to move the network back onto your site.

The service, opening to the public today at Techcrunch50, provides a free and easy way to place a social networking layer over any site. This layer exists on your site in the form of a bar at the bottom of the page. This is not unlike the Meebo chat bar that you may have seen on this site and others recently. But Meebo was really only about chat (and sharing), Stribe wants this bar to be a full-fledged social network on your site, including members, comments, and yes, chat.

There’s a lot of live video streaming competition out there right now, but Justin.tv remains the biggest. And it’s looking to hold that lead with a redesign launching today, along with some new features.

The new site has an overall cleaner and simplified look. And simplification is the key to another big change: The addition of big front page broadcaster. When you first load up the site you will see front and center a large video player with the phrase “Live broadcasting in one click.” If you click on the big red button below it, you’ll load up your camera options screen, where you pick a camera to record from. From there you can log-in or create an account to start broadcasting.

How do you advertise on a Web-based instant messaging service without interrupting conversations and annoying the hell out of users? Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg thinks he has the answer: “There is a moment of boredom while they are waiting for a response, that is when they click on ads.” He’s observed this based on how people interact with the ads which began appearing on Meebo.com last March. Today, Meebo is creating an ad network across partner sites which use its new Community IM service, which ads a Meebo IM bar at the bottom of participating sites.

Visitors to one of the 85 partner sites which have implemented the Community IM product (including Current TV, DailyStrength, Flixster, and Webs.com) can chat with their IM buddies without leaving the sites. Today, Meebo is introducing new ad units which pop up along the bottom left of the browser, beginning with ads for the Toyota Piou and AT&Ts. For the Toyota ad, a little car icon pops up on the left of the Meebo IM bar, away from all of the chat activity on the bottom right. If you click on the car, a larger ad 900X400 pixel rich ad overlay opens up which can show a video or any number of interactive ads. “When they click we do not take them away from the conversation,” says Sternberg. During the whole time people is watching the ads, they can still chat with their friends through the Meebo IM column on the right.

Over the last year or so, having online chat integrated into a website has quickly moved from “nifty” to “the norm”. The feature first caught on with Facebook, and has since made its way to a variety of other sites, including MySpace and Orkut. But most publishers and social networks don’t really have the resources to build their own chat clients, which can frustrate users that have become accustomed to the feature.

Meebo, the popular chat startup, has come a long way in helping solve this problem. The company has spent the last year building up Community IM, a product that allows sites to quickly integrate a full-featured browser-based chat client in a matter of days. Meebo has signed 75 partner sites and is currently live on 32 of them, with deployment quickly ramping up. Today, Community IM is getting a major upgrade, and it’s one that represents a major shift in the way the service can be used, beginning to transition Community IM from a pure chat product to a powerful sharing service.

Is Meebo moving into email? The web-based chat service already centralizes instant messages from AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk, Facebook, MySpace, and more. Folding in emails from different accounts across the Web is a logical next step. In fact, Meebo already tiptoed into the email arena this morning with a new feature which appeared in its Windows desktop notifier.

A new “Mail” tab can now be found in preferences, allowing Meebo users to “Enable mail notifications for these accounts:” It then lists the IM accounts you’ve already signed up for on Meebo (which makes sense, since generally you use the same username and password for your email as you do for your IM within any given service such as Yahoo or Gmail/Gtalk or Facebook). When you get a new email, you get a notification pop up at the bottom of your computer screen, just like you do for new IMs. When you click on the notification, it takes you to the underlying email service.

The Netherlands-based eBuddy, which markets a comprehensive application that lets users handle multiple instant messaging accounts from the web or their mobile phones, is today releasing an application for the Android platform a couple months after Meebo made its similar product available on there (November 2008).

The eBuddy application for Google’s open mobile OS is now available for free on the Android Market, and users can thus benefit from a single ID to chat with their friends on third-party communication platforms such as Facebook, Gtalk, Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, ICQ and more.

Meebo’s Community IM is getting its biggest vote of confidence yet tonight, when it is deployed on popular social network myYearbook. Community IM is Meebo’s answer to Facebook Chat, offering publishers and social networks a way to introduce a persistent chat bar at the bottom of their sites without having to develop one on their own. And while Meebo had deployed the product to 25 partner sites before now, myYearbook is the largest by a substantial margin, with over nine million monthly unique visitors.

We’ve known this was coming for a long time – in fact, we reported on it when Meebo’s Community IM product was first announced last July. But Meebo took its time to actually roll out the product, having only launched it on three partner sites by the end of January 2009. Since then, things have been moving much more quickly, with Community IM now live on 25 sites. Meebo also has over 65 total partners signed.

Web chat service Meebo, always innovative with advertising, is trying out something fairly aggressive: full takeover ads that show a persistent advertisement in the background.

The company says that they already got 1% or higher click throughs on existing ads units on the site, which included rollovers at the bottom of the screen and another unit right in the middle. But the new units actually take over the entire background of the site, meaning users are literally slammed with the messaging. They are presented with an option of removing the add with a click.

And the users don’t seem to mind at all.

Founder/CEO Seth Sternberg wrote a blog post today on the new ads and asked for user feedback. Most of the 100+ comments to the post are very positive. Example comments:

Meebo, a popular web-based chat service, has announced that it is going to extend its successful advertising platform to include the growing number of partners that are deploying its Community IM product, which launched last year.

Last summer Meebo launched interactive social ads on its main chat portal at meebo.com, presenting users with small icons at the bottom of their chat windows that would display a popup when clicked (users can also share the ads they especially like with their friends). A number of major corporations have run campaigns using the unique advertising platform, and so far Meebo is posting impressive results: the company says that it has seen an average 1% CTR with 10% of chat users sharing ads with their online buddies.

Now Meebo is ready to extend its successful ad platform to its partners that are using Community IM, Meebo’s chat product that allows web publishers to implement persistent browser-based chat clients on their websites (it’s akin to Facebook Chat). Ads will be displayed in the chat bar at the bottom of the browser (see the screenshot below) and will expand when the user clicks on the small icon shown. Community IM sites participate in a rev share agreement with Meebo, and will be able to use ads from Meebo’s inventory or from their own.

Last week Meebo and Facebook teamed to launch the first integration of Facebook Connect + Chat, allowing Meebo users to chat with their Facebook friends from the popular web-based IM service. The feature has had a rocky history: Meebo used an unsanctioned method to integrate Facebook Chat in December, then temporarily disabled it at Facebook’s request. And while many were quick to point the finger at Facebook (which has had a history of bullying some third party services), as it turns out the site was eager to help Meebo, and is likely open to helping other third parties.

The announcement is the latest in a series of policy changes that indicate that instant messaging is finally starting to open up, representing a paradigm shift could potentially lead to a slew of innovations. That is, as soon as the largest remaining holdouts – Yahoo and Microsoft – follow suit.

Historically, IM has existed on closed and proprietary systems, with dedicated clients that can only connect to a single network. For many years users with accounts on multiple networks (say, AOL and MSN), would have to keep multiple programs open, which ate up system resources and cluttered desktops. By 2000 a handful of clients emerged that would allow users to manage multiple IM accounts from a single program. These stayed largely under the radar until 2002, when a client called Trillian hit 1 million downloads (and then jumped to 5 million six months later).

With all the talk about Meebo adding support for Facebook chat yesterday, I took notice of a message in our tips inbox today about another instant messaging aggregator service that I’d never heard of before adding support for Skype chat. IMO.IM is its name, it’s still in alpha stage (whatever that means), and it’s actually pretty neat.

First, the good. IMO.IM is simple, web-based service that doesn’t require you to register, comes with a desktop version for Windows and supports multiple languages. It can handle text, voice and video conversations on the most important instant messaging services including Windows Live Messenger / MSN, AIM / ICQ, MySpace, Yahoo Messenger, Jabber, Gtalk as well as – and correct me if I’m wrong but I think this is a first – Skype. I tried using the service on my iPhone (no app, just browse to the website) and it worked seamlessly.

Update: Nimbuzz and fring also supports Skype chat on mobile devices.

The bad? No Mac or Linux desktop application and no Facebook chat (yet), but that’s about the only things we could come up with for an otherwise awesome little product.

Meebo’s Community IM, which effectively offers websites a Facebook Chat-like messaging platform “in a box”, looks like it’s finally ready for the masses. The product was first unveiled last July, and has announced partnerships with over a dozen sites including Sugar Publishing, AddictingGames, and myYearbook. But until now it has been rolled out slowly, and is currently live on only three sites: Flixster, Wadja, and Zorpia. While some of the wait can be attributed to the partner sites themselves, Meebo has also been taking its time to ensure that its service could handle the traffic load.

Now it sounds like Meebo is ready to swing into full gear. Today the product went live on Piczo, a social site with a large following among teenagers. And beginning next month, the company will roll out on 5-6 more partner sites and plans to continue that pace for the following months (Meebo won’t comment on which sites will be launching, but we can expect the largest ones to drag their feet the longest).

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.

Tonight Meebo is announcing that they’re removing support for Facebook Chat. From the company’s post on the change:

Last night we released the finalist names for the Crunchies Awards. Vote here for who you think should win. We’ve set up a site that is pretty self-explanatory, with all of the names of each finalist for every category, along with links to their Websites and Crunchbase profiles where you can learn more about each one before voting. The Crunchies represents the best the Web had to offer in 2008, and you get to help choose who will win. Below is a voter’s guide for two of the major categories to get you started.

Best Overall is the big prize. Amazon Web Services makes it as a finalist this year because of the sheer number of startups that are built on top of its cloud computing infrastructure. Facebook won last year, but makes a return as a nominee due to popular demand. Facebook continued to gain massive mainstream adoption in 2008 (with 140 million members now) and launched some major initiatives to extend its social computing platform beyond its site, most notably Facebook Connect (which by itself is a finalist for Best Technology Innovation, going up against Google Friend Connect). But does Facebook deserve to win again?

MySpace and Facebook may be frenemies forever, but now they have a new mutual friend that will pass notes between them. Meebo, the Web-based IM service, now supports IM accounts from both social networks. That means you can enter your Facebook and MySpace account IDs into Meebo and the chat with friends from both social networks in one IM box. The integration will work on Meebo.com itself, as well its Community IM partner sites.

While the partnership with MySpace is official, Meebo basically reverse-engineered Facebook’s IM. So if Facebook decides to change its IM protocols, the Meebo integration could break until its engineers apply a band aid. The MySpace integration, in contrast, is built on top of official APIs and incorporates all the security features of MySpace IM.

If you think there is too much noise about the U.S. election now, wait until next week. On Election Day, not only will every media outlet be covering the vote, but so will voters themselves who will have ample opportunity to Tweet, Digg, video, and IM the vote.

Most of these “reports” will probably consist of people telling the world that “I’m voting!” or who they just cast their vote for. Who you vote for used to be a private affair, but no more. It is almost as if your vote does not count, unless you IM or Tweet it. (But don’t worry, it does).

On the bright side, when every voter is also a potential election observer, any shenanigans can and will be instantly broadcast over the Web and quickly picked up by the mainstream media. At least there will be a clear record that can serve as a starting point for later investigation if need be. No doubt, there will be false Tweets as well.