"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."

Even cooler is the sharing option in the Meebo bar across the lower part of the screen. This feature enables users to share links via any IM service connected to their Meebo account as well as via Twitter, Facebook, and email. The feature reminds us a lot of Gmail Labs' addition of Google Search to email and chat.

This is what happens when the "Share" button in the Meebo bar is clicked:

Interested parties can get a closer look at features and functionality in this demo video:

Sites adopting the new tech from Meebo are expected to see significant spikes in user engagement. Partner sites announced today include Aeria Games, BakeSpace, Chictini, Fragegg, GamerNook, JamLegend, PlayedOnline, and SparkPeople.

The MySpace team worked with Meebo to assist with its integration. The Facebook integration relies on Facebook Chat for Pidgin, an open source IM project.

With the addition of these massive user bases, Meebo becomes - arguably - the premiere service for managing all of your IM conversations in one place. That's impressive in and of itself. But it also hints at something even more interesting for the future with Meebo's Community IM initiative.

What's Community IM? It's a Meebo project that will introduce Web-based IM features to a number of community oriented sites over the coming months, allowing users of those sites to engage in IM conversations when visiting their favorite Web sites.

What's more, it's a concept that's strikingly similar to Facebook's chat implementation. And that's where adding Facebook access gets really interesting.

With Community IM, Facebook users - who are already familiar with concept of logging into a Web site and chatting with friends - will now have access to their Facebook friends through Meebo when visiting any number of sites on the Web. Same goes for MySpace. That means sharing something with Facebook or MySpace contacts becomes as easy as firing off an IM message through Meebo. No more bookmarklets or cutting, logging in, and pasting. Now, it's as simple as sending an IM.

So, without much fanfare - and much in the same way Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and the Open Stack are extending the reach of the social graph - it looks like Meebo just moved the Web-based IM conversations of millions of users and their contacts beyond the walled gardens of social networks to the Web at large. And that's pretty exciting.

To try the new Meebo Facebook and MySpace access, log into your Meebo account and add the new accounts to your profile. Or visit Meebo and log into your Facebook and MySpace accounts from there.

Powered by fast-growing web IM platform Meebo, these new chat widgets can be accompanied by multimedia that chat users can view together. In a world where the magazine industry has to be feeling some pain from sites like MySpace and Facebook, maybe magazines have to put a little MySpace on their own websites.

We're very bullish on Meebo in general but this campaign, the Seventeen Magazine implementation in particular, is pretty uninspiring. We hope that when Meebo makes an appearance on PopularMechanics.com it will be a little more interesting. That wouldn't be hard.

Meebo tells a good story about huge increases in time on site for publishers that install their chat widgets, and that makes sense. Chat gives people a reason to stay on one page, if it's done well and there are a good number of people chatting then it's genuinely more interactive than anything a publisher can offer by themselves.

Meebo has a history of offering an interesting mix of aiming at the mainstream while still innovating in ways that are thought provoking for early adopters.

Bringing web IM to big mainstream websites is an interesting step in the evolution of publishing. We think it makes sense. We hope the big publishers can figure out what to do with it.

If you're a service like Web-based IM leader Meebo, you build an app to enhance the functionality of the Web-based service. And that's exactly what they've done with Meebo for Android.

Even more importantly, Android allows Meebo to deliver an application that can't live on the iPhone platform today. Why? Because of the iPhone's inability to run multiple applications simultaneously. "Running another iPhone application in the background" is a foreign concept - unless you're the owner of a jailbroken phone.

While glimpses of the Meebo app have been available for months, today marks the first opportunity for G1 users to download the app to their handset from the Android Market.

Meebo - which boasts traffic of more than 5 billion messages per month - continues to advance their service. This mobile offering marks another step forward in their continuing efforts to make the service more accessible to more people. The Android release follows closely on the heels of their Community IM partnership announcement which promises exponential growth in the number of Meebo users over the coming months.

And while the Android app might not increase the user base as drastically as Community IM, it's still a significant step in taking advantage of Android features that its closest competitor currently lacks.

These days, a number of developers seem to be building mobile apps simply because they can. Meebo for Android, however, avoids the pitfall of simply "reiterating existing services" by taking a step forward in augmenting Meebo's functionality using the Android platform.

It does look like Meebo is indeed trying to implement some of its earlier ideas about what advertising on the site would look like. Meebo already features a number of ads on its site and has estblished partnerships with various large content producers, but starting today, Meebo will also feature ads from the San Francisco-based advertising network VideoEgg. These new ads will range from "sponsored games to video trailers to product configurators." Some of the ads will be sharable, while others will come with associated wallpapers and buddy icons. Some ads will also automatically expand if a user hovers over them for more than 3 seconds.

Transparency in Advertising

When we first wrote about advertising on Meebo, we asked if ad agencies could make ads that don't suck. It does indeed look like Meebo has been putting a lot of thought into this process (the original partnership between Meebo and VideoEgg was announced almost a year ago) and is devoting quite a few resources to getting its advertising model right. It will be interesting to see how Meebo's user will react to these expanded monetization efforts.

Meebo, the leading "IM in the browser" play, realizes this. And with Community IM, they're hoping to capitalize on it, by incorporating XMPP/Jabber IM into any Web-based community. If early numbers are any indication, they're going to be wildly successful.

So how many users could that long-tail of communities garner for Meebo? Based on comScore Media Metrix, Meebo estimates the potential size of the partner network to have an unduplicated global reach of 72.9 million with more than 26 million of those users in the US.

Slated to launch this fall, the movie site Flixster will be the first out of the gates on the platform.

And that's just the beginning. With the types of communities Meebo is targeting, there's a great deal more room to grow once the service is launched to the public:

"If you have an online community with over 20K daily users, Meebo can add IM to your website. Users will be able to chat with other community members as well as buddies outside your network, directly from your site."

Perhaps even more impressive is Meebo's foresight to build its solution on an open foundation. Running on a XMPP/Jabber backbone, Meebo Community IM will be able to connect directly with other popular IM networks. AIM, MSN, Google Talk, and Yahoo! will all be available options. What's more, XMPP will enable them to federate relationships across the various partners, so that a user from one community will be able to communicate with users on another community.

Needless to say, the combination of the extensible technology and the sheer volume of online communities that could choose to adopt this solution translate into a great deal of potential for Meebo.

It's no wonder Meebo's valuation sits north of $200 million.

All in all, Meebo is projecting huge numbers, already. And the estimates of the potential could get astronomical. But, it's also evident that a yet-to-be-launched solution can be met with any amount of skepticism. So where does that put us?

Rest assured, this isn't the first time Meebo has been saddled with "it can't be done." After more than three years of proving their detractors wrong, we remain convinced that Meebo is going to succeed.

It's standards based, it will bring real-time "presence" to social networks unable to invest the resources to build out the feature for themselves and it sounds like a very good idea. None the less, we do have some concerns about how much social graph, user activity and advertising data Meebo is about to get its hands on.

Prelaunch partners in the initiative to date include PopSugar, Tagged, Pixo, Addicting Games, The Insider (CBS), DanceJam, Flixter, MyYearbook and SparkArt. Readers may not have heard of many of these services (unless you've been spammed by Tagged) but several of the sites do have significant user numbers.

Meebo hopes that by announcing the service now they will amass more partners before launch in Fall. The company says that though social networks have an unusually high average "time on site" between 20 and 30 minutes - Meebo numbers are dramatically higher. Chat sessions tend to stay open for between 2 and 3 hours each, the company says. Meebo says its 1 year old "Rooms" feature, group chat sessions with media sharing and embeddable in HTML web pages, now see an aggregate 28 million unique users each month. That's an insanely high number that could grow substantially when 1 to 1 communication is rolled out across partner social networks.

Partner networks will be able to choose whether to allow their users to chat with contacts on other IM networks from inside their sites. In other words, you may be able to hang out at Flixter and talk movies with friends from your AIM contact list who aren't on the site at the moment. We hope that the networks will choose to enable this much open communication and Meebo says that at least a few have already said that they will.

Who's not in? The stuffed shirts at LinkedIn won't be able to ping eachother instantly with business questions, they aren't taking part in the campaign so far. Neither is Ning, home of enough niche social networks to choke an army of horses. We'd like to see Ning go Meebo, but they are one of the few Web 2.0 startups on the market that's raised more money than Meebo already. Ning has raised $60 million, Meebo $30 million plus (VentureBeat).

There's More Money on the Table

These partner networks will share in the revenue served up by Meebo inside the chat window.

Meebo had a "come to Jesus" moment in April when it made a new hire and announced that it would be moving towards offering uniquely useful, crowd-pleasing advertising. We don't know how sophisticated this new advertising is really proving to be, but we stand behind our statement in April that cynics questioning the company's gargantuan valuation of $200m+ are wrong. Meebo is rocking the market and this new campaign is only going to make that more true.

Show us an infrastructure play that's based on open standards (Jabber/XMPP in this case) and we'll show you an innovation that we're excited about. IM is truly one of the most engaging features of the web and we expect that the users of many niche social networks will be excited about this partnership campaign.

What About User Data?

The one question we have about this otherwise fantastic sounding idea is this: is Meebo going to get its hands on too much user data? By powering IM across a list of social networks and being the choice for chat on AIM, Yahoo Messenger, etc. for millions of people - Meebo is going to have a great picture of who is friends with whom and exactly where.

The company told us that the open standard XMPP/Jabber makes this less frightening than it might be, but we're not so sure. Meebo will likely have a great deal of knowledge about all our "social graphs" as well as the user and advertiser activity on all the sites it partners with. Will users rise up and demand data portability? Will second tier social nets guard their traffic and ad data? Don't bet on it. We hope that the developer community will at least call loudly for Meebo to open up user data to it, so that innovation can spring from the company's huge store of information.

In the mean time, here comes a really great chat experience in a whole lot of new places.

What Meebone basically does is display the Meebo web app in an AIR window, somewhat akin to what Fluid does on the Mac.

As we reported in March, Meebo is becoming more and more of a mainstream application and chances are that quite a few users are using it on their desktops already and not just on the go, so having a desktop client for it actually makes sense for a lot of users. It effectively clones the look and feel of the web app, so even novice users will feel right at home with Meebone.

While it might not be a good choice for IM power users, Meebone would be a great choice for those who are looking for a basic IM client that can handle multiple accounts and services.

Meebo's spent six months studying focus groups gathered from their 30 million users per month to see what kind of advertising users will put up with. The response has been unsurprising - users say they don't want impersonal sales messages broadcast at them. They want to be invited into useful or entertaining engagements with advertisers where they, the users, remain in control of the experience. They (we) want utility-based ad campaigns.

Starting next month, Meebo will be rolling out ads in the IM service that invite users to access quizzes, polls, long-form video and other resources. Users will be able to opt-in to sponsored experiences that are targeted to them specifically, based on their demographics and behavior. Negative feedback on a particular ad will teach the ad server not to serve the same ad to a particular user and there will be a leader board on the site displaying the most popular ads according to user response.

Meebo says that in tests, they are experiencing 2 to 4% user engagement with these new types of ads, a far higher percentage than banner ads see. The company says its goal will be to never show users the ads they see on other sites - though they also say that advertisers needn't worry: traditional "form factors" will still be usable here ("You've got Flash video? We show Flash video!")

While behavior tracking has begun to face a growing backlash among web users, Meebo believes that we want the value that can be delivered based on such tracking - as long as information isn't gathered in a "creepy" way.

I asked Green and Carter if they were familiar with APML, Attention Profile Markup Language, and neither said they were. (What blogs do these guys read?) They were interested in the idea, they said. Everyone says they are interested in whatever you are when they are doing press briefings. "If there's some way to make this open and not proprietary," new hire Carter said, "all the better." Just ask Digg or Newsgator and they'll tell you that there is. You can export your history in APML from Digg, for example, and get personalized watch-lists set up based on those interests inside Newsgator's FeedDemon. That's pretty cool.

Meebo needs to come up with some innovative way to monetize their huge traffic numbers, and this new ad model could be it. As things stand, the company is reported to be struggling to either sell itself at a huge valuation or raise more investor money. We've written that they're worth a substantial valuation and that value may be what's rolling out now.

Can Ad Agencies Make Ads That Don't Suck?

Quality advertising is like live streaming video - not very many people can do it very well. General consensus among at least self-appointed marketing 2.0 thought-leaders (!) is that it's all about offering clear value to would-be audiences. Not just the promise of value, in the event that a product is purchased, but immediate value just from engaging with the ad in the first place!

We wrote about Intel's branded PopURLs site targeting the stuffy world of enterprise software last week. That's a great example. The Snoop Dog Twitter transformation machine - that's a strange example of the same sort of strategy. Burger King's Subservient Chicken is the either the stupidest or one of the smartest examples of this strategy, depending on your perspective.

It's hard to design ad experiences that don't end up feeling shallow, vapid, overly commercialized and insulting. The safer bet is to try to be funny. Broadcasting funny at people has been working so far in some media.

Meebo is going to try to do something different, though. They'll offer some amount of consulting and guidance to brands interested in advertising on their platform. They believe that the leading ad agencies are all being pushed to explore this new utility-based advertising model online.

We'll see. If just a handful out of every hundred users are interested in doing more than just IM and watch user submitted videos together on Meebo - then the effort will be a big success. That will be easier said than done, though.

Mainstream Users

We talked to Meebo several months ago about the company's business. Venture Beat writes that the company currently reports 29 million unique users each month. Based on what Meebo told us, those users aren't interested in the higher-tech innovations that many pundits and readers are saying would deliver more substantive value to the service. The vast majority of users login in to a single IM account and IM with their existing friends on that platform. They don't use it to communicate with people on multiple IM services. They just want to IM from school or work without installing the desktop IM client they use at home.

Add in Meebo chat functionality on a swath of new sites looking to offer video, voice and other functionality available through the new Meebo developers' platform and you've got a recipe for rapid proliferation.

Instant is Good

People love IM, synchronous communication and the smooth flow of information IM-style are why we've written here that XMPP (Jabber) could be key to the next generation of web applications. Meebo isn't even alone in rocking the web IM space - Amsterdam's eBuddy is racking up the millions of users and venture capital as well.

Relative Valuations

Early Meebo money came from Sequoia Capital, funders of YouTube and Google. Did YouTube have some drastically innovative technology? No. Could a large company have spent a few million building a great MySpace-clone from scratch? Of course. That's not what it's about, though, in some cases. The ability to get in early on a basic social activity, whether it be online video, social networking or web IM, and then ramp up user numbers - is far easier said than done.

Is Meebo worth upwards of $200 million? It may very well be.

Give it a try, discuss amongst yourselves and witness the handiness of Meebo's embedded "rooms" feature.

Initial partners for the Meebo Rooms Network are Revision 3, RockYou!, Piczo, Social Project, and Tagged. You can see the Revision3 implementation here, at which users can chat about a synchronized video feed of Rev 3 shows.

A comparison can certainly be made to AOL's Userplane, which also offers an API for their embeddable chat software (though not for free -- "integrated installs" start at $500), and a revenue sharing program. In fact, Userplane Money was announced just a couple of weeks after Meebo Rooms.

When Meebo announced their developer platform in the fall, we speculated that all manner of apps could benefit from having access to live chat. "By allowing third-parties to tap into Meebo's communication platform and users, the company's new development platform could actually be used to create intriguing web office applications," wrote Emre Sokullu in November. The same might be said for Meebo Rooms, which could allow developers to create interesting collaboration apps on top of the API.

An open API which turns Meebo's Rooms widget into a service could help put their chat technology into broader use and grow the network. By placing ads on the rooms and introducing a revenue sharing program, Meebo has likely found a way to offer a free API, make money from it, and keep developers happy. I've embedded a Meebo room the old fashioned way below just for fun: