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Well-funded instant messaging and sharing service Meebo is annoucing a new product tonight that will offer loyalty programs and website recommendations for frequent visitors to any site around the web.

The new Meebo MiniBar, not to be confused with the drastically overpriced hotel fare, is a free way for users to choose to share the sites they visit with their friends from various social neetworks including Facebook, to discover related sites frequented by people with similar interests and to gain VIP status on their favorite sites. The technology will be available on Tuesday and will roll out over time to become visible to the 180 million unique users who visit a page that uses Meebo monthly.

Usually when a startup raises $100K, it's not much to shake a stick at. With young companies raising tens of millions of dollars or being gobbled up in large acquisitions, why is such a small investment notable? In the case of HipChat - a startup focused on providing internal chat and IM solutions for small businesses - $100K came to them in a bit of an unconventional way, but in a way that can be a lesson to other startups.

You've probably never heard of Matt Mireles and Bjorn Liljequist but with a $4000 dollar budget and an engineering team paid in iPhones, the two already have Meebo founder Seth Sternberg as their advisor and praise from VC Fred Wilson. The duo's filtering service Speakertext will launch at tomorrow's New York Tech Meetup and the concept is a simple one - to make video interesting.

Embedded chat for real-time communication has been a core part of Meebo's offering for a while. Their latest release of new features focuses on integrating social platforms to allow for cross-network sharing of content.

"SEO has been a great way for web sites to acquire new users, and will continue to be," said CEO Seth Sternberg in am email last night. "At the same time, site owners are looking for the next great way to attract additional users. i think that 'social graph optimization' can be the next SEO - making it really easy for your users to share content from your site to their friends, be they on social networks, IM networks, in email, etc."

Meebo, the leading Web-based IM service, has reached its current level of popularity by providing Web access to popular IM interfaces like AOL, MSN, and GTalk. Meanwhile, in parallel, there has been another growing segment of instant messaging taking hold in popular social networks. It was only a matter of time before Meebo extended its functionality to embrace this growing market - and now it's happened with Meebo's Facebook and MySpace IM integration.