Joost, the desktop-based long-form video service that aims to take on the old TV model with a large pile of venture capital, is scrapping one of its defining features built in-house, inline chat, and replacing it with outside chat service meebo. Essentially, the announcement means that users will be able to chat with all their friends on MSN, Yahoo Messenger, AIM and GoogleTalk while watching the high-resolution, professional video content on Joost. It's a good combination.

If you haven't checked out Joost lately, I can tell you that I looked at it for the first time in months tonight: it looks nicer, has far more content (and ads) than before and appears more stable on a Mac. It's free for anyone to download. The meebo integration was supposed to have gone live minutes ago, I'm not seeing it yet but I'm sure it will arrive soon.

A web-based cross-platform chat client, meebo says more than 1 million people spend over two and a half hours each, daily, on its site. Joost, which has started by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström amongst others, has raised almost $50 million in venture funding and says it has had more than 1 million beta testers. It's a good distribution deal for meebo, but some cross promotion to meebo users wouldn't hurt Joost either. That will likely happen, at the very least, every time a meebo user chatting with their IM friends on MSN or Yahoo messenger through Joost is asked "what are you doing?"

Meebo is a VC darling as well - this is the kind of deal that high-powered investors can help make happen, a great example of why people say it's as much about the connections as it is about the cash.

Joost launched a developer platform for widgets at the end of this summer, though there's little evidence of widespread adoption of that platform yet. Meebo launched a platform of its own last week with selected partners offering everything from integrated audio to live streaming video. Complex features are all well and good, but tonight's announcement is likely to be one of the most significant features either of these companies can offer.