Media on the Web is going from a solo affair to a shared experience. We are seeing this in everything from CNN live news videos enabled with Facebook chat to Meebo Rooms and Tiny Chat. Today, a new startup from Los Angeles called Qlipso is launching its own virtual rooms where friends can share videos and play Flash games with each other.

The service is in private beta and requires a Windows-only download for the avatars (there’s also a Web app without the avatars). You can get one of 1,000 invites here. Click on “Get Started” and ignore the beta key request. Send an email to the contact listed (betsy) and put “TechCrunch Invite” in the subject line.

You sign in with Facebook Connect and can invite up to eight friends to share any Flash-based media. Once inside the virtual room, you can interact via text chat, video chat, voice-chat, or videogame-quality avatars. The integration with Facebook Connect makes it easy to invite friends via a message in your news feed. It also supports MySpace, AIM, and MSN Messenger.

The Qlipso download adds a plug-in to your browser which identifies Flash media whenever you are surfing the Web and places a share button next to it. When you click teh share button, it launches the app and lets you see which of your contacts are online so you can invite them in.

Qlipso is aiming the service at media sites which might want to incorporate the experience to make the consumption of their videos and games more social and interactive. When a group of people are watching a video, Qlipso can recommend other videos in the left-hand column to keep the group of friends in the room longer. The service brings in elements of virtual worlds with the avatars which can move realistically and perform tricks like flips and throwing tomatoes at the screen.

The startup is a sponsor of our Realtime Crunchup this Friday and will be demoing the service at the event.

Here’s a video:

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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.

The best founding team for a startup is a group of two or three people who have synergistic – not overlapping – skills. Note that it’s also important your goals and passions be similar. If one of you wants to sell fast and the other wants to build a billion dollar business, that’ll make for pretty serious friction down the road. So too would a team where one person’s more interested in enterprise startups while the other person’s passion lies in consumer experiences. With that out of the way, however, it’s critical that you look for people with complementary skills to your own. In consumer internet, that usually means one front-end user-facing developer, one back-end server-side developer, and ultimately a business person (details will come in a later post).

The reality though, is that we tend to hang out with people who are just like us. Remember that story I told about the three business school students telling me about their tech startup, leaving me to wonder who’d actually build the product? I see that all too frequently – from business folks and techies alike. It’s just easier to hang out with people in your same classes at school, or your same group at work.

If you happen to be in school now, you’re in the most fertile place possible to meet your co-founders. Take advantage of it! How’d I meet Elaine and Sandy? Mutual friends from school. How about some other teams? Larry and Sergey from Google met at Stanford. So did Jerry and David from Yahoo!. The Plaxo founders also met in school, which is also where Mark from Facebook met his co-founders. Having trouble meeting folks you think would be good co-founders? Here are a couple ideas:

1. Join student groups relevant to your interests. If you’re a business major – go check out the Engineering Society’s monthly meeting. If you’re in the CS department, I’ll bet the business school students would kill to meet you at the next Entrepreneurship Club meeting.

2. If your school doesn’t already have a student group designed to foster collaboration between groups of students with the skills necessary to get a startup rolling, start one! BASES at Stanford is a great model to follow. It brings together students from both the undergraduate and graduate levels, across disciplines such as design, computer science and business.

Ok, so most folks reading this are probably out of school. Fortunately, there are a number of examples of successful founding teams that met outside of school. Chad and Steve from YouTube met while working at PayPal. Sean and Shawn from Napster met in an IRC channel. Cisco was a husband and wife team. It helps to be in school, but it’s not an absolute requirement. A few practical ideas applicable to everyone, in school or not:

1. Get out there and find activities that attract diverse groups of people. In Silicon Valley, rock climbing’s a current hot spot for startup folks. So is ultimate frisbee. There’s at least one weekly ultimate frisbee game I’m aware of that’s chock-full of people from the startup industry, on both the business and tech sides.

2. Ask your friends for intros to people in an area you’re trying to learn about. Chances are someone in your group of techies knows someone business oriented. The first folks you meet may not be a fit, but keep asking for referrals and you’ll get there.

3. Join / attend local organizations designed to foster introductions between folks interested in startups. SVASE or Founder Dating in Silicon Valley, First Tuesday in London and Hackers and Founders in New York all come to mind.

4. Team with co-workers at your current job or that internship you did last summer. Just make sure to not violate any non-competes, etc, in the process! Generally speaking, as long as you’re not working on a project your employer would reasonably want to own, you’re probably ok. Of course, do not use any of your employer’s resources. A great friend of mine is scheming, right now, with a co-worker on their next great startup. One’s a PM and the other’s an engineer.

I’m sure some of you are thinking “that’s all great – but I live in the middle of nowhere and none of those resources are available to me.” To be blunt, find a way to move to Silicon Valley. Other cities like New York, Boston, Seattle, LA and Austin TX also have pretty strong startup communities. However, nowhere has as many real estate agents, lawyers, accountants, landlords, employees, co-founders, mentors, and VCs all steeped in startup culture as does Silicon Valley. The ecosystem is just hard to beat. The result is that you’ll be exposed to many more people who can help you get started. In my case, I grew up in Connecticut and spent a fair amount of time in New York – all the while trying to start companies, relatively unsuccessfully. Friends in Silicon Valley kept telling me to move out there for all the reasons I mentioned above. I finally found my ticket in the form of admission to business school in the valley. Find your ticket.

The hardest part of starting from scratch is finding the right co-founders. Ideas, comparatively, are easy. You may spend three years finding your co-founders while you’ll come up with a solid idea every 3 months or so. Luckily, once you settle into a great founding team you’ll be able to execute much faster on that killer idea you all come up with – beating those ten other folks who came up with the same idea at the same time.

Remember, the ultimate goal is to create a founding team that can, within its own skill set, get a working prototype out the door. This means you need to find folks with skills that compensate for your weaknesses. Co-founding a startup is like getting into a marriage – picking the right people is critical. In later posts I’ll get more specific on how to figure out if the folks you’re meeting are the right people to work with, and also how to deal with issues like splitting equity and paying yourselves before raising funding. Feel free to follow me on Twitter to get notifications of later posts on this topic, both here and on the Meebo Blog.

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So what caused the recent spike? Meebo’s Director of Business Development Daniel Bernstein says that this can largely be attributed to Community IM rolling out to a slew of content sites (in other words, news publications and blogs) and the introduction of the service’s drag-and-drop sharing feature. Before now Community IM has been primarily deployed on social networks, which means that users usually had to log in before they’d see them. On these other sites, there’s no such barrier.

The syndicated bar has had a major effect on Meebo’s revenues. Before 2008 Meebo’s income was a big zero, and that finally changed when it finally began running ads on its portal at Meebo.com last year. Meebo declined to specify its exact revenues, but says that it expects revenue to jump 10x in 2009, in large part thanks to the uptake of its Community IM bar.

COO Martin Green says that Meebo’s roster of clients has been very satisfied with the results, and that many of them have switched from running small test campaigns (the average insertion order size in late 2008 was 50k) to full fledged campaigns, with an average order size in 2009 at around 100k with some as high as 500k. Green says that the expected 10x revenue growth this year isn’t all attributed to the Community IM bar though, explaining that building relationships with brands who are now repeat buyers and a longer time existing in the market have also been factors.

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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.

This is the first post in what’s going to be a series of blogs on how to go from nothing – no connections, no team, no money and no knowledge of how the startup industry really works – to operating a growing business. I mentioned to Mike that I was going to kick this series off over on the Meebo Blog, but he suggested I start it here. Gladly! So for this first post, here’s the best advice I can give you: join an awesome founding team and get your product out the door ASAP. Then, forget everything else, VCs included, and just build.

One of the things I do as a founder of a later stage startup is to meet with early stage entrepreneurs to help them get their companies going. Nine times out of ten, the meeting ends with them asking me for introductions to VCs. Little do they know that, even if they could raise VC, it’d start them down the wrong path. So, this is what I tell them:

At the exact moment you had your idea, ten other people had the exact same idea. There was just something in the environment that made it the right time for folks to think that one up. The race has already begun! Who’s going to execute first? Who’s going to execute best? If you want to waste nine months trying to raise VC money for that idea, great. But six months in, you’re gonna cry when you see someone else put out that same product you’re pitching me right now. Like I said, forget everything else and just get your product out the door. Now.

Inevitably, the excuses begin: I need to hire people to build the product. I don’t know any developers. I need money for the servers. I want to get that last promotion at my current company first!

Here’s the rub: in consumer internet (and often enterprise), if your founding team doesn’t have the chops to get a prototype of your product out and in the hands of a blogger to test and write about, you might as well save yourself a lot of pain – you’re not going anywhere. Need proof? Just look at some of the most successful tech companies in the last decade: eBay, YouTube, Sun, Oracle, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Yahoo!, and Google. All of them share a couple common traits: they launched before taking outside investment, and they were able to do it because they had a set of founders with the skills to build the initial version of the product themselves. Only eBay was founded by a single individual – the rest were team efforts.

With that background, let’s get to the three most important things you can do to go from nothing to a kicking startup.

First and foremost, find a great founding team. One person is almost never enough. You just can’t do it all. Rather, team up with one or two other people who have skills synergistic – not overlapping – with your own, but with similar goals and passions. I can’t tell you how frequently teams of three business school students tell me they’re going to start the next great consumer Internet company. When I point out that they’re all business people, and wonder who’s going to build the product, they almost always fall back on “we’ll get a couple of undergrads to do it,” or, “we’ll outsource it.” If I hear either one of those, I know the startup’s already dead. Sorry, folks. Harsh, but probably true.

The best composition is probably one engineer whose passion lies in the pixels on the screen and another engineer whose passion is making bits fly really fast through servers. In Meebo’s case, for example, I was lucky enough to partner up with Elaine and Sandy. Elaine is a JavaScript wizard who has a great visual eye and makes sure every pixel is in its place. Sandy is a straight C nerd and is all about efficiency. Together, they built the first versions of Meebo from scratch. Now, if you have a business guy along for the ride, that works too. But let me tell you, the sum total of my contribution to Meebo prior to our launch was getting us incorporated (read: easy) and suggesting that “the button might look better over there” (read: not much). Post launch, if you gain traction, is where the business person will help take the load off of the technical folks. The business person can take all the meetings while the technical folks work on making the product better.

Second, like I said, forget everything else and just get your product out the door. No office. No phone system. No hiring. No press. No legal muck. No raising money. No looking for partnerships (who’s going to partner with you anyway?). The success or failure of the adoption of your product is what will create 99% of the initial value of your company. If no one ever uses your product, you have no value. Oh, and for the record, raising VC does not help get traction – in another blog post, I’ll argue that if anything, it hurts. So just forget everything else and focus on what matters – getting an alpha of your product out the door and into the hands of your friends and family. Use some URL like www.mygreatstartup.com/shhh.html. Then, once you’ve fixed the initial bugs and incorporated a feature or two that everyone requested, go live. Remember: keep it simple. The initial product you build is for you – you don’t know what features everyone else wants. Launch fast and light, and listen to your users for feedback. In the product, always have a way to ask for user feedback. Remember, once TechCrunch or GigaOm writes about you, you’ll most likely get crushed with a single surge of traffic (we fondly call it the “blog spike”), only to watch almost all of it flitter away. Take advantage of that surge to learn and iterate.

Finally, get good mentors. If someone had been there and just told me “join a great founding team, focus on the product, and forget everything else,” I would have saved a lot of time and heartache. A good mentor is someone who has been part of the startup community themselves – someone who has a realistic understanding of some of the basic dos and don’ts of starting up. You don’t need many – one or two to begin. In Meebo’s case, two of our friends, Todd and Cam, gave us a ton of pre-launch advice. Every time we started straying down a wrong path, like flirting with just talking to that one VC or even thinking about approaching a company about a partnership, they’d always come out with something like, “is that going to get the product out faster?” Trust me, once you’ve launched and achieved traction, you’ll have your pick of mentors, VCs, partners and all the legal expenses you need.

I hope that some of this hit home for those of you who’ve been working on your own startups. In later posts I’m going to get into more detail on specific topics like hiring, raising money, what types of ideas have the potential to get big, finding your founders, and the like. You can follow them over on the Meebo Blog, so bookmark this post and Mike tells me they’ll link to subsequent posts. Alternatively, follow me on Twitter (@sethjs) where I’ll mention when I put up a new post.

Update:

Part 2: Finding Your Co-Founders

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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.

To date, Skype has focused on desktop and mobile software to handle peer-to-peer based calling over the Internet. This is not surprising, because when Skype first started back in 2003 bandwidth costs were a an order of magnitude higher than they are today and desktop apps were the only way to go if they were ever going to make a decent profit from Internet-based telephony. But with bandwidth prices decreasing worldwide at a fast rate, it makes a lot of sense for Skype to at least consider moving into web applications and claim their ground. The fastest way to do that would be to pick up a startup with proven technology and early traction in that field, like TokBox, PalTalk or Tinychat.

Here’s another reason Skype might be looking at web-based communication service providers. What if eBay/Skype cannot develop a workaround that would allow them to continue the service without using the Joltid-owned source code powering its core peer-to-peer engine? It’s conceivable that might drive the company to consider purchasing companies with similar or related Web-based technology to speed up its move away from the litigation threat hanging over them.

Of course, companies talk to one another all the time and as far as we know there haven’t been any official acquisition offers from Skype at this point. But they’re definitely looking.

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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.

Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect offer some of this functionality, but again, that’s not actually your social network, it’s Google or Facebook’s social layer laid on top of your site. As such, neither of those are very customizable, at all. Stribe is completely customizable if you know what you’re doing (or have a developer who does). Maybe you don’t want the bar at the bottom of the site — you can move it. Maybe you don’t want it to be the default black — you can change it. But if you just want the defaults, it’s as easy as installing one bit of JavaScript code onto your site to get it working.

People who register to be a member of your site by way of Stribe also become members of the larger Stribe community. This means that if you have a friend who is a member of another Stribe-powered network, you can still chat with them even when you’re on different sites.

Stribe will run on the “freemium” model, offering much of their service for free, but charging a fee to those customers who are of a certain size (according to site traffic). That will range from $10 to $50 a month to use Stribe to create a social network for your site.

CEO Kamel Zeroual and CTO Gael Delalleau presented at the conference today.

Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)

The experts: Robert Scoble, Sean Parker, Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Mike Schroepfer, Chamillionaire

MS: No integration with any social network there now? Was that intentional?

KZ: The point is that you just need to control and see what is going on, on YOUR website.

DC: 37Signals says that sometimes products do too much, you should do less. With many product, you can do too many things, and it becomes difficult to figure out what to use it for.

KZ: The low-hanging fruit is the community, but we’re trying to reach out to different markets.

C: Are you saying, if I’m Walgreens, this will turn it into a social network? This is different from Twitter, you are just at a site and you want to interact.

KZ: That’s exactly the point, man.

RS: Enterprises already have tools like this thought. What makes this different?

KZ: There are a lot of sites that don’t want to use someone else to become a social network.

Images:

Video:

Other Coverage
Connected communities matter: Introducing Stribe Stribe.

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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.

Previously, you had to log-in or set up an account first and could then start recording on a different page. This new way makes it much more obvious how to get recording right away.

Another change is the addition of a Meebo IM chat bar to each page on the site. Previously, chat only existed in channel chat rooms, but now the Meebo bar will allow you to continually chat no matter where you are on the site. Justin.tv says it’s the first live video site to use the Meebo bar, and has already seen 10% of its chat messages coming through as IMs, rather than in the chat areas on channels. That’s about 600,000 IMs out of 6 millon messages a day, we’re told. Expect that number to go up now that it’s sitewide.

As I said, Justin.tv remains the top live streaming site, but its competitors have all been making moves recently to try and spur usage. One big move was Mogulus recently rebranding to Livestream. Traffic to all of these sites across the board seems to be slipping. But when Ustream launched a redesign a year ago, it helped kick start growth.

Justin.tv just launched its Camtweet, live video on Twitter service, last week at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp. This new simplified Justin.tv main experience, seems like an extension of the idea of simplicity, which I like. Justin.tv also launched a DVR feature last month.

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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.

These ads are similar to VideoEgg’s Twig Ad bar, except they are integrated directly into each site rather than use a frame overlay. But the opt-in nature of both types of ads are part of a general trend of giving consumers control over when and how marketing messages are presented to them.

Meebo says its IM service reaches 50 million people a month and can target ads on age, gender, or location. Sternberg says Meebo is seeing 1 percent clickthrough rates on the ads. But he is not without competitors. AOL is planning to offer its own IM bar to external sites through its Socialthing for Websites service, which presumably will also be connected to its ad network. The exchange with sites is that they get social IM features without having to reinvent the wheel, and they get a share of any IM-based ad revenue as well.

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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.

Before now, users on a site with Community IM were restricted to chatting with friends on that site’s social graph — if I was on myYearbook, I could only chat with my myYearbook buddies. Starting today, users on some partner sites will be prompted by a small message alongside the chat bar that invites them to connect with their other friends using their Meebo account.

This means that users will be able to chat with friends on any chat network Meebo supports, which includes AIM, Facebook, and Gtalk. They’ll also be able to tap into the social graphs of other Community IM partner sites that they’re a part of — if I was on cafemom, I could log in with my Meebo account and see if any of my friends from my myYearbook account were online.

The other major new addition to Community IM is a very intuitive sharing feature. Aftering hit the new ‘Share’ button at the bottom left hand corner of the chat bar, the browser will dim slightly, save for your chat buddy list and icons for Facebook, Twitter, and Email at the top of the screen. Clicking on any of your buddies will immediately send them a link to the site you’re currently on (no copy/paste required). Likewise, clicking on the Facebook, Twitter, or Email icons will let you share the page via any of these services in a matter of seconds. Sharing isn’t exactly a unique feature, but it’s executed very well here — you can send a link to a friend in only two mouse clicks.

Combined with the inter-network chat also launching today, this new sharing feature is going to be driving quite a bit of traffic for Meebo’s partner sites, though it comes with a bit of a tradeoff. Users will now be swapping links to partner sites other than the one their friends are currently looking at (I might send a link for Cafemom to one of my friends currently browsing Flixster), which could occasionally drive traffic away from a partner site. That said, Meebo believes that this will generally boost traffic for all partners involved, and says that all of its partners knew this was coming and are eager for it.

The upgraded Community IM is being deployed to CafeMom and SparkPeople today, and the new chat bar will soon begin rolling it out to existing partners as well (Meebo says that all partners will eventually make the switch).

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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.

Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg characterizes this as a “convenience feature” for desktop users: “Basically, we’re creating the same bridge between the webmail services and the desktop that we’ve already created between Meebo’s web site and the desktop.”

The notifier is also a good place to test new features since most of Meebo’s members use the browser-based versions of its service. Why not add this to Meebo.com as well? Sternberg tries to shoot that notion down. He writes (via email): “everything we do is oriented around real-time communication. so i think it’s unlikely we’ll build a standard email client into meebo.com.”

That does leave room for a “non-standard” email client. Certainly, adding email notifications that pop up like IM’s and then take you to your Web-based email service of choice would be just as much a convenience for Web-based users as for desktop users. But there is another clue pointing to somethingbigger than that brewing at Meebo. Every employee’s email address has been switched from employee@meebo.com to employee@meebo-inc.com. A switch like this is often a precursor to the launch of a Webmail product. MySpace recently did the same thing, as did Yahoo back in 1997 before it launched Yahoo mail. What would a Meebo mail product look like? It would have to take a backseat to IM, but you still need a place to send messages when a recipient is not online. Maybe the future of email is as a backup repository for IMs when you are offline.

(Hat tip to the folks at Crowded Road for noticing the new notifier feature. Check out their Offline TechCrunch Reader iPhone app—iTunes link).

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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.

No Skype chat yet, which is a bit of a bummer, but apparently the startup is looking to add that functionality in their mobile clients in addition to all the other ones currently supported. I wonder which startup will be the first to bring Skype chat to Android, since neither Meebo nor eBuddy currently support it and both Nimbuzz and fring, competitors that do support Skype IM through their mobile clients, have yet to make their way to the open platform.

What I like about the eBuddy application is that it has the ability to run in the background, so when you receive a phone call the IM service will keep running and even reconnect you automatically when the internet connection is lost. If you maintain multiple friend lists on instant messaging tools, eBuddy neatly organizes all your contacts in one list so you don’t even need to think about which third-party service you should be connecting to, and lets you seamlessly jump from one chat conversation to the next.

On a sidenote: I can’t grasp why Android Market doesn’t offer a search function on its regular website – only on mobile – but if you ever want to look for applications that are available on Android you might want to check out Cyrket.com. The eBuddy app is listed here.

I got eBuddy, which is backed by a healthy €11.5 million (which currently converts to approximately $15.6 million), to share some numbers to get a feel of the traction it’s getting in the market, and came away fairly impressed.

These are the numbers they pitched me: 20 million mobile downloads of the J2ME mobile client since its launch in June 2007, 5+ million unique monthly mobile users on eBuddy Mobile, and with almost 14 million downloads of eBuddy Mobile Messenger on GetJar the top ranked mobile program on the platform.

Stellar upwards-pointing trends indeed, but this type of hockey stick growth is of course no guarantee that all these new users will be efficiently monetized over the long run. Only time will tell if eBuddy finds a way to turn its successful product into a profitable business.

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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.

Meebo is really nailing it with Community IM, offering publishers a way to increase engagement while at the same time giving them another source of revenue (it’s bringing its highly performing interactive ad platform to partners next month). Add that to the fact that real-time community toolbars seem to be quickly becoming the norm (even YouTube is testing its own), and it looks like Meebo won’t have any shortage of partners to deploy Community IM to.

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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:

“Awesome…Black is a really nice look for Meebo…The ad is really subtle, too — not all up in your face…“Did we strike a good balance between not disturbing your use of Meebo, while acknowledging the need to run ads?”…Hell to the yes!”

“I read your message about why the background changed and everything, and I definitely agree with what you’re saying. (Especially the sucky, flashy ads that cover your page you’re trying to view). With that said, nice work! I actually really like the way the ad is incorporated into the background, and slightly opaque. It’s not too distracting, and if the ads are helping you guys out, by all means, keep doing it this way! : )”

“I think this is a brilliant way to put ads up without being obtrusive and annoying. No one likes banner ads or popups. This does look like a good balance. I hate ads as much as the next guy, but know the need for them to support your business, and the fact that you concidered your clientell in your design means a lot. It means my willingness not to click the ‘backtoblue’ button and get rid of it because it simply being there and me not clicking is paying you for a job well done.”

YouTube, ESPN, MySpace and others have tried similar ads in the past, and these things command great fees. If Meebo really has gotten the users to buy into this, we may be seeing similar stuff all over the place, and soon.

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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.

Alongside the announcement, Meebo has also revealed a handful of new partner sites that will be deploying Community IM, including CafeMom, StarPulse, IGN, Current TV, CrispyGamer, DailyStrength.org, GGL Global Gaming, and Internet Brands (over 40 partners have now announced plans to integrate the product into their sites, though some are taking their time).

One of the concerns often brought up about Meebo, especially after its $25 million funding round last year, is how the site plans to generate revenue. The initial results of the new ad platform on meebo.com have been encouraging, and if partner sites continue to see similarly impressive results, Community IM could well turn into a very lucrative product for the company.

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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).

Prompted by the application’s growing popularity and incensed by the fact that users no longer had to use its official client, AOL attempted to block Trillian in early 2002, though the application’s developers would release patches very quickly to un-break the service. Yahoo and MSN attempted to enact similar measures against third party clients with limited success, as their restrictions were quickly cracked.

Eventually the battles between third party IM clients and the networks died down to a simmer – third-party programs would rely on open-sourced plugins to access the chat networks, and would be quickly updated if anything broke. The networks seemed to gradually accept the fact that these clients would persist, but wouldn’t do anything to help get their workarounds to function correctly (and oftentimes advanced features like file transfer didn’t).

Finally, in 2006 some chinks started to appear in IM’s armor. Google launched Gtalk, a chat client built on the open standard Jabber protocol. Meebo, a popular web-based multi protocol client, launched at around the same time, and along with other clients encouraged sites to begin opening their protocols to third parties.

Gradually AOL’s AIM network began to get in on the action, first with Open AIM 1.0 (which really wasn’t open at all, as it was primarily concerned with plugins and status updates) and later in 2008 with Open AIM 2.0. The second iteration of Open AIM offers third party web services like Meebo and native clients like Adium a sanctioned way to access the network.

More recently, the social networks have also begun to also grant access to Meebo and some other third parties, though most of them aren’t quite open (at least not yet). MySpace worked with meebo to launch support in December, and the aforementioned Facebook support was added last week.

It’s clear that progress is being made, but there are still two major holdouts: Microsoft’s Window Live Messenger (AKA MSN) and Yahoo Messenger. The two networks have teamed to let their users talk to each other, but everyone else is out of luck.

Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg says that he has reached out to both companies, but that neither of them are willing to offer a sanctioned way to access their networks. He notes that while Meebo’s integration with MSN and Yahoo are secure, he’d prefer to use the standards established by the networks themselves. A lack of ‘official’ third party access is also likely the reason why the networks have not been integrated into Gmail Chat (AIM has).

Sternberg points out the parallels between IM and SMS messaging, which has grown to become a massive market that now sees over 2 trillion messages sent per year. While SMS might seem ubiquitous now, for years major carriers didn’t support inter-network texting (you could only send messages to contacts using the same carrier). It wasn’t until these networks opened up that SMS became the norm, spurring incredible growth and widespread innovation (you can now use SMS to order pizza, look up stock prices, and get directions).

IM is also ripe for innovation, but developers have been hampered by a near-complete lack of cooperation from the major IM networks. Perhaps developers will take advantage of the growing number of networks that are open, adding new features that make them attractive to users still stuck on the old behemoths. Then Yahoo and Microsoft might be compelled to finally change – or perish.

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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.

According to this blog post, IMO.IM has some other great stuff in the pipeline, including text to speech and vice versa functionality in all languages, face and object recognition, smart advertising, 3D emoticons and avatars, offline access, and more. Consider me subscribed to that blog to learn when those features become available.

Also worth noting is that IMO.IM was co-founded by Georges Harik, one of the first 10 employees at Google and manager of several of its early products. He’s also an active angel investor; he invested in our competitor Venturebeat so he’s lucky to get written up here at all (please note the sarcasm), and a handful of other internet startups which you can check out in his Crunchbase profile. Also, FriendFeed co-founders and also ex-Googlers Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh are listed as advisors to IMO.IM.

Surprised that they haven’t enjoyed more buzz so far.

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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).

But even with the limited rollout, the three partner sites that had deployed Community IM before today have seen impressive results: Meebo reported 2.5 million unique users on Community IM in December, and expects to beat that figure in January. That number still pales in comparison to the 45 million users seen across Meebo’s entire network, but if the site sees similar turnout from each of its new partners it could double or triple within the month. In light of the platform’s success, Meebo is also planning to roll out advertising sooner than expected (Community IM is currently ad-free).

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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.

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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
Amazon Web Services
Facebook
Android
hulu
Twitter

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?

This was also the year that Google launched its Android phone, bringing the unadulterated Web to mobile devices beyond the iPhone (which won Best Gadget last year for its 2G version). Hulu emerged as a rarity in the Web video world, a popular site with a serious revenue model. And Twitter broke out as the service everyone can’t stop talking (or Tweeting) about. As with any new communication technology, people keep finding novel ways to use Twitter’s public instant-messaging service.

Best New Startup of 2008
Dropbox
FriendFeed
GoodGuide
Tapulous
Topspin Media
Yammer

This category recognizes the best startup to launch publicly in 2008. Dropbox makes it dead-simple to transfer files between computers. It creates a Dropbox folder on your computer that you just drag files into, and then they become available to anyone else with access to that folder. FriendFeed sparked the whole lifestreaming movement this year, and kept adding improvements that makes it easier to filter the Web through the actions of everyone in your various social networks. GoodGuide has created an impressive product database (and iPhone app) that tells you at a glance how green or safe that baby cream or toy is that you just put in your shopping cart.

Tapulous created some of the most popular iPhone apps with Tap Tap Revenge, Tap Tap Dance, and Twinkle (a Twitter client, of course), despite some internal turmoil. Topspin Media, founded by former Yahoo Music chief Ian Rogers, is trying to help bring the music industry into the 21st Century by embracing the Internet as a marketing vehicle instead of a necessary evil. And Yammer is an enterprise version of Twitter which won the top prize at this year’s TechCrunch50.

Here are the finalists for some of the other categories. To see a complete list, go to the Crunchies site and vote for who you think should win. Voting ends January 5.

Best Technology Innovation
Facebook Connect
Google Friend Connect
Google Chrome
Windows Live Mesh
Swype
Yahoo BOSS

Best New Gadget
Android G1
Asus 1000 Netbook Computer
Flip MinoHD video camera
iPhone 3G
SlingCatcher

Best App
Get Satisfaction
Google Reader
Minted
meebo
MySpace Music
Yelp

Best Mobile App
Google Mobile (for iPhone)
Imeem Mobile (for Android)
Pandora Radio (for iPhone)
rolando (for iPhone)
ShopSavvy (for Android)
Ocarina (for iPhone)

Most Likely To Make the World a Better Place
Akoha
Better Place
Causes
CO2Stats
GoodGuide
Kiva

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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.

Meebo also supports AIM, Gtalk, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Jabber, and ICQ accounts. It claims 40 million members, who send 5 billion messages a month. ComScore reports 7.4 million monthly visitors worldwide to Meebo.com, and shows some flattening of growth. Tapping into Facebook and MySpace should help Meebo keep its growth going.

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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.

But that’s not stopping everyone from piling on the social media election parade. For instance, you can Twitter what’s happening on Election Day by adding “#votereport” to any Tweets, and they will appear on the Twitter Vote Report, which was put together by the guys at TechPresident.

Or you can IM the vote on Meebo, which is partnering with Comedy Central to put Meebo chat rooms on The Daily Show’s Indecision2008 website.

Or you can take a camera with you and make video on election day and put it on this special YouTube VideoYourVote page (which for some odd reason is hosted out of the UK). The best of these will be rebroadcast on PBS.

Don’t like PBS? You can Digg the best election stories on this special Digg election page, which is being republished on Current.TV’s website and will be a cornerstone of Current.TV’s on-air Election Day coverage. Current.TV will also be rebroadcasting clips from 12Seconds.tv tagged “election.” Here’s a gem from 12Seconds.tv, in which video uploaders are asked to answer the question of whether their vote counts:

Still want to get involved? Then grab a widget! And put it on your MySpace page. You can choose between the Obama tax calculator, which tells you how your taxes would change under Obama’s tax plan, and this McCain-Palin widget, which is basically just a commercial (Both are embedded below). The Obama widget has been viewed more than 1.3 million times in the past three weeks, from only than 4,885 installs. The McCain-Palin widget has been installed 13,633 times, but viewed only about 53,000 times. (The SNL Palin-Hillary skit widget, in contrast, has been viewed more than 7.9 million times).

In the end, will any of this matter? Not if you don’t vote. You are gonna vote, right?

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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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The newest enlistements include Bleacher Report, Dhingana, Fanpop, GlobalGrind, IBeatYou, OrangeShark, PerfSpot, UGAME.net, Yaari, Zinch, and Zorpia. These join a set of previously announced partners that includes DanceJam, Flixster, myYearbook, Nickelodeon/MTVN Kids and Family Group’s AddictingGames, Piczo, SparkArt, Sugar Publishing and Tagged. That’s a grand total of 19 companies that believe instant messaging within the browser will make their sites stickier.

Meebo is touting these partners as collectively providing the service with over 70 million new users. Obviously, that’s stretching the truth a bit. None of the integrations has launched yet (the first will be Flixster, probably within the next few weeks) and even when all of them do launch, only a small fraction of their visitors can be expected to use Community IM.

Check a demo of the product below, at least as it stood in September.

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Instant messaging service Meebo has given us a demo of its upcoming “Community IM” platform, which allows websites to seamlessly integrate a browser-based chat window very similar to Facebook Chat.

Meebo announced the upcoming community chat feature last July, with initial partners including DanceJam, myYearbook, AddictingGames, Sugar Publishing and Tagged. Flixster will be the first partner to launch the service, with an expected release in mid-October, with more services launching in the coming months.

The video below shows Meebo’s Community IM integrated into Flickr, which isn’t actually one of Meebo’s current partners (though an alliance may form in the future). The project was constructed as a proof-of-concept during last week’s Yahoo Hack Day, and was awarded second place in the event’s Flickr competition.

The video confirms what we suspected from the initial screenshots: this is basically a Facebook Chat clone, with the ability to communicate with external networks like AIM and MSN thrown in for good measure. This isn’t a bad thing, as most social networks have been scrambling to add a Chat feature but don’t have the resources to do so. Integrated chat is reported to increase user retention, which helps drive ad revenue.

Unfortunately, one of the most exciting features shown in the video – the ability to drag an image directly into a chat window – isn’t part of the default Community IM platform (it was a custom addition Meebo added within a few hours for the Hack Day competition). Meebo explains that it shows just how easily they can customize the platform for their partners, and says that it may well include the rich-media dragging as part of an upcoming release.

Meebo Community IM on Flickr from Meebo on Vimeo.

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LiveWorld is a publicly traded company that’s been around since 1996 and is best known for its white labeled social networks. These are online communities that LiveWorld helps clients build up around their existing brands, and they often take a good deal more time and effort to set up than communities created on top of self-service platforms like Ning or KickApps.

However, LiveWorld is making a significant foray into “out-of-the-box” communities with the release of LiveBar, a widget-like site addition that brings community features to any website using only one line of JavaScript.

The LiveBar consists of a thin strip that sticks to the bottom of the browser window and displays social content related to the page. It’s reminiscent of Facebook Chat or the upcoming community instant messaging offering from Meebo. But instead of facilitating instant messages, the LiveBar shows three types of user contributions: Conversations, Soapboxes, and Shouts.

Conversations are essentially lightweight forum threads where users can post messages and solicit responses. Soapboxes are akin to blog posts and Shouts are like tweets in that they’re restricted to 140 characters. In the LiveBar’s simplest implementation, these pieces of UGC are associated with individual URLs, so when you move from one page to the next, you see different content.

However, they can also be tied together into so-called bundles so that discussions form across pages that relate to each other. The LiveBar can also be rolled out across multiple sites on different domains, with bundles providing social glue around pages and sites that were formerly fragmented.

The biggest downside to the LiveBar (which could also be seen as its greatest virtue) is its discreetness. Visitors are prone to overlook it entirely because it sits so low and short on the page. To combat this tendency, LiveWorld has developed a suite of widgets that hook the LiveBar into the actual page layout. The widgets can be used, for example, to print the most recent conversations or solicit new ones. I expect that most publishers will deploy these extra widgets to get the most bang for their buck. After all, the LiveBar isn’t free; like other LiveWorld services, it’ll cost you thousands of dollars just to get it up and running.

LiveWorld plans to add more flexibility and functionality to the LiveBar over time, with chat in particular on the way. This will put LiveWorld in direct competition with Meebo, although Meebo’s specialty in online instant messaging should make for a superior product.

Both Tulane University and A&E Biography already plan to use LiveBar on their respective sites.

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