Meebo, the online chat service that lets you log into all your instant messenger clients from a central location, has announced its agreement with Universal Music Group as its latest partner. This deal signifies a branding opportunity for both Meebo and UMG, as the music company will be able to distribute premium content through Meebo’s various services and enable users to share it with their friends from there.
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Last night Meebo announced that it rolled out the first live version of its Community IM service on Flixster, the movie social network. Back in July I wrote about Meebo’s new service and called it a “Userplane-like platform”. Ultimately it is very similar in that both Userplane and Meebo have ultimately launched a Facebook-like chat platform available for third-party sites. This one looks pretty cool as displayed in the video below.

When it comes to the social web, it’s pretty clear that Facebook has been leading the pack for the past year and a half. Even Yahoo! duplicated many of the features provided by the Facebook platform and Facebook Connect in their new services announced last night. This new chat platform also includes updates and notifications.

One of the cool features of this new service is that if you want to continue a conversation but don’t want to stay on the site you are at you can pop-out the conversation to another window on Meebo.com. I’m not quite sure how valuable this component actually is to be honest since you are still going to need at least one browser window open.

Either way, the trend toward new types of internal community chat platforms is an interesting one and over the past 6 to 12 months there have been some significant releases by the largest players. We will continue to follow the chat space as it evolves over the coming months.

Last night Meebo announced a slew of new partners for its white-label instant messaging service. The announcement also included statements that the company now has almost 73 million monthly users which is most definitely a bold statement. I took the opportunity to speak with Seth Sternberg, CEO of Meebo, about what these announcements mean for his company and what the future holds.

We discussed Meebo and potential integration with mobile platforms as well as how his product fits on the social web. Meebo offers a product which is nearly identical to Userplane and heavily resembles Facebook’s new chat client. I spoke with Seth about these similarities and what all of the recent chat services means for the future of chat on the web.

Check out our interview below to learn more about the future of Meebo and chat on the web!

 

 Interview With Seth Sternberg, CEO of Meebo [18:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

When Bebo launched their IM service one month ago, we were there to break the news. Unfortunately not many other people found that news to be very interesting. Within a month the service was apparently shut down. Over the weekend Mashable was the first to notice that the service had disappeared. I was going to write an article as it happened but I forgot.

Why did I forget? I forgot because I don’t use Bebo IM! Facebook chat has proven to become a central IM service. Within months, it has become one of the primary chat platforms for me (then again I write about Facebook everyday). There is no word as to why Bebo decided to shut down the chat application but our guess is that not enough people were using the service.

There could have also been an issue with abuse. Bebo was recently acquired by AOL who has been trying to cobble together their diverse social products. Unlike Facebook and MySpace, the majority of Bebo traffic comes from abroad. Have you used the Bebo chat service? Are you concerned about it disappearing?

This weekend Bebo has released a chat feature for their site. The new feature resembles Facebook’s chat in that there is a chat display at the bottom of every page on the site. You can view a list which displays current friends that are online and then there is also separate windows for each instant message. The more messages you open, the more prompts that show up (as displayed in the image below).

Chat is rapidly becoming a standard feature across social platforms. I’ve been discussing chat an increasing amount as Meebo and Userplane continue to expand their offerings and social platforms continue to roll out new chat features. It’s great to see Bebo releasing their own version of chat as well. Chat naturally integrates into social networks so it’s not surprising to see Bebo release this.

I would guess that we’ll see other social networks currently without chat features begin to roll out a service over the coming months. Most social networks appear to be following Facebook’s lead when it comes to rolling out new features as they are now the largest social network worldwide. It will be interesting to see what creative twists we see on newly released chat platforms.

Thanks to Harel Shattenstein for the heads up!

Yesterday, Digsby announced that they now provide support for Facebook. This now makes is the chat application with access to the most chat platforms. The only downside of Digsby is if you have multiple chat logins, you are going to have to scroll through a lot of usernames.

Also, if you have set up aliases for different users on another chat platform, it doesn’t transfer those over. That can get pretty annoying when you have a couple hundred contacts on AIM or another chat. It also sucks that you can’t sort users by name within status. Aside from that, Digsby is an awesome application. The fact that Facebook chat has been extended beyond the platform is also really great.

For the past few years, I been suggesting that chat needs to be integrated with a social platform. This is a great first step to that. The only downside about the integration so far is that profiles don’t show up directly within the chat application. I’m sure this will be a future feature via a Digsby Facebook application that enables you to make your profile information accessible via Digsby.

While I’ve spent most of this post making suggestions about how Digsby could make their application better, Digsby is one of the best chat applications out there. I now only need to have one chat application open to be able to talk with all of my friends. If you are looking for a simple to use and highly function chat application, Digsby is probably the first one I would recommend. So if you want to get Facebook chat on your desktop, along with Twitter, AIM, G-Chat, and a whole slew of others, go download Digsby.

WooMe, the online network for fast, virtual introductions recently secured another sizable round of funding and is closing in on 100,000 users just a few months after its launch. The site offers a place to host or join back to back speed sessions with people, live in voice and video.

WooMe is very easy to use and gets right down to its business: making people introductions faster and easier. Access to rich profiles prior to discussions, a privilege competitor Speeddate does not grant, makes the selection process slightly less hit-or-miss. In addition, within sessions, users can list their interests or preferred discussion topic keywords so that other Wooers can instantaneously relate.

This feature certainly facilitates discussion and alleviates some of the awkwardness of speed dating. When thinking about first dates or introductions, one often conjures up the agonizing memories of nervously firing questions, desperately searching for common ground. WooMe displays that common ground just as the first word is uttered.

Furthermore, much like the Facebook application Define Me, Wooers can choose words to describe each other. These tags are used on personal profiles to build reputations. These basic networking tools provide a decent amount of metadata to make the process of meeting people more enjoyable and relevant.

As others have suggested, WooMe has the potential to expand beyond speed dating. Interviewing for all sorts of purposes seems to be the logical step toward advancing the service, but I’m not convinced that it is the right environment—at least not currently. When I began interviewing for jobs, I made sure to update my various social networking profiles accordingly, removing information I felt might be deemed inappropriate by company insiders.

Access to my profiles is permission based, but there was always that looming “But what if…?” If WooMe is to become a site for professional recruitment, access to profiles, defining characteristics and interests is going to have to be regulated because I don’t see an employer particularly appreciating an interest in “foreplay” or “kinky” as a defining characteristic. Or maybe he or she will, depending on the company—only kidding.

The point is, if WooMe is to become a trusted platform for meeting other professionals, it will have to address the issue of the service’s inherently casual nature. I doubt LinkedIn or Monster would be the success it is today if social or more personal information were readily available to users within the service.

But in the meantime, if you are into speed dating or other types of quick and casual conversations, give WooMe a spin.