Meebo discontinued: shutting down on July 11, 2012 | Hacker News Reader

Meebo discontinued: shutting down on July 11, 2012

meebo.com

103 pointssuperasn101 comments

Sorry for the language, but WTF GOOGLE? Meebo has been around since forever (well, actually 2005) when it was only a web messenger and used by a LOT of people whenever you couldn't or wouldn't want to install a native messaging app, or messaging was blocked on your network. I actually know people that used Meebo exactly for that reason, no installation required and furthermore if you created yourself a Meebo account, you had all your different messaging protocols available and you had logs wherever/whenever you wanted/needed them.

It makes me really sad to see this piece of internet history (if one can call it that since it's not that old) getting axed, especially getting axed by a company this big which could surely afford to keep those servers running (maybe a meebo engineer could chime in on that since I have no idea what it takes to keep these running).

Surely meebo started changing its business angle quite a while ago but I don't think they would have cut the service that made them what they are today. That said, I really hope Google keeps its fingers of ANY service I enjoyed in the past.

+1. This is truly sad. One can only hope that the more Google kill, the more enterprenours will be unwilling to sell them their project (baby).

Let's not kid ourselves, browser based instant messaging across different protocols is not that interesting anymore. Facebook, What's App and iMessages won.

This will free up this capable team to work on something more current.

Let's not kid ourselves. Millions of people use instant messaging daily. Facebook in no way "won".

Poll: when's the last time you logged in to MSN/AOL/Yahoo Messenger?

I used Facebook for a brief period a year ago. Never touched FB chat. I stopped using Facebook and always found it tedious to sign in to both GTalk and AIM. Meebo solved a problem for me.

Honestly, there are better web messengers out there. Off the very top of my head, there's IM+ and eBuddy. Hell, even Trillian has a web version now.

None of them have the polish and stability of Meebo Messenger, I don't know what criteria for "better" they excel at.

There's also Google Talk in Gmail/Google+ ;)

Speaking of google, when the hell are they going to release a GChat app for iOS? The GMail web page on iOS doesn't have GChat, so I went searching for an app on the Apple App Store a while back and found one. I'm pretty sure it was just a UIWebView wrapper which sent a different user-agent to fetch the desktop version of GChat, and it wasn't long before it broke (I think google had changed the GChat URL).

it's just xmpp, just download an iOS XMPP client and you're all set. Same with FB chat.

You won't get push notifications without turning over your Gmail credentials to a third party. Google handles that for you for the official Android client. I only do it with application specific passwords and two factor authentication, but it's still an annoyance.

I would guess that technology caught up with them.

With the penetration of smartphones, I bet that that's become a better alternative than web IM for most people.

Exactly. Too focused on having a unified IM network for the desktop web. Facebook chat took over desktop web chat. Whatsapp took over mobile app chat. And Meebo got into toolbars and sharing widgets. Their lack of product focus and subsequent sale reminds me a lot of Loopt.

To me, Meebo was a lyric in "Here Comes Another Bubble", and not much else.

I'm not sure I'd consider it a notable piece of internet history. Google, yes; Netscape, yes; Napster, yes. LinkExchange, no; AllAdvantage, no; Meebo, probably not.

My first thought was "this is sad news for users of their great IM client, but at least it means no more Meebo Bar."

Then I read: NOTE: The Meebo Bar will continue to be available to site publishers and will see continued improvements and new features in the weeks and months ahead.

So, basically, the worst of both worlds.

Meebo Bar makes money and maintains a number of partnerships that are useful.

The IM client does not.

What is with all the hate? Meebo tried, tried again, they failed, so they exited.

1. Meebo Messenger was great, but was not pulling in nearly enough revenue

2. Meebo tried to pivot to an advertising bar for more revenue with no luck

Understand that Google probably didn't buy Meebo with the intent of shutting its services. Meebo was most likely already failing (hence the 70MM overall raise and 100MM exit), and would have had to shut down anyway. However the founders were, luckily, able to exit the company first.

Meebo was great at its peak, but Google didn't kill Meebo. It was already dead.

Indeed. The Meebo Product/Eng team by all accounts was excellent. Same for the exec team. At the end of the day they were bitten by the same things Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger figured out a long time ago. Monetizing IM is hard.

But at least they had the gumption to "go for it". Respect.

Definitely. I hope someone figures out an unintrusive way to monetize IM services so we can see a variety of inspired IM clients/platforms instead of the same dingy things repeated.

Huh, so if Meebo is already "dead" why did Google buy Meebo? Google bought Meebo last week!

Surely the conclusion from this is that Google bought Meebo FOR the Meebo bar, not that the Meebo bar has failed. The Meebo bar product is the one they're continuing!

The fact that Google believes it may be able to derive value from the Meebo bar product does not mean that Meebo was in a position to derive similar value at a palatable level of risk.

Google has a precedent of buying up startups that "discover" and conquer a new piece of mainstream media web sites.

They bought Feedburner way back in 2007 because they'd come to own RSS feeds at almost all the major publishers.

Now they're buying Meebo because that will let them own the toolbar across the bottom of lots of major publishers...where they will certainly start surfacing Google + bullcrap that no one wants to see.

>where they will certainly start surfacing Google +

They are now. A random website with the Meebo bar: http://www.gossipcop.com/tim-poe-americas-got-talent-stutter...

Google bought Meebo for the team, not the product.

I assumed that wasn't the case as in the original comment thread people reported that Meebo had been letting staff go because of the acquisition, although I guess that could mean they're only interested in a small portion of the team. My mistake for discounting that possibility.

They let go people from the sales team. Execs, engineering and product were all hired (assuming they made it through the standard Google hiring process).

100 million is pretty high for a talent acquisition. How big is the team?

Nothing saying that they can't have bought Meebo for both the team and the bar.

I'm actually surprised they chose Meebo over Ebuddy, which I've preferred over Meebo for many years (lately it has also become a bit too bloated, so I've been using imo.im). But maybe Google knows something I don't about the Meebo team.

Only the most important and biggest tech companies we can expect to still "be alive" for more than a decade from now, maybe 2. Most of the others should disappear within a decade, and I think that goes for Facebook, too, unless they produce something revolutionary over the next few years.

They bought the Meebo Bar, the team, or both. While other IM aggregators are better, the IM aggregator was not the point.

Meebo bar was truly nasty.

Oh, come on. Fuck this.

Can we ever trust a service to keep running for even a third of our lifetime?

My favorite coffee shop shut down.

This is why I tend to use paid services. The incentive to shut down services that make money is a lot less than those that hemhorrage cash.

You can have mismanaged paid services that hemhorrage cash, and you can have well managed free services that are extremely profitable. I don't think there's a logical correlation.

One datapoint is the massive amount of investment they took, and the amount of time they've been going. It was obvious they'd need an exit soon.

Not necessarily. A non-free service is unlikely to get enough traction to remain in business. And I can't think of a single paid messaging client.

I think going into messaging at all would be extremely risky and you'd need to have a really fantastic product and a clever business plan to make it profitable. The space is already dominated by free options - all of which are funded by giant companies that make their revenue on other products.

The only paid client I know of is Trillian Pro. They've been around for quite a while but I have a feeling it's a small company with low overhead. It would be interesting to know what percentage of their revenue comes from the paid pro version vs the ad-supported free version.

The services that they're shutting down were all provided for free with no obvious source of significant revenue.

If you were paying them and they were making a profit then you might have a better chance.

> The services that they're shutting down were all provided for free with no obvious source of significant revenue.

You mean like GMail?

You would have at least thought they could integrate the MSN/AIM/Yahoo messenger etc into GMail.

AIM has been integrated in Gmail since 2007.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/gmail-chat-aim-crazy-d...

You can unfortunately no longer log into an AIM account in Gmail and have those contacts appear like in the blog post you linked to. They got rid of that feature a couple years ago.

Bait and switch.

The "cloud" really replaced "desktop computing"... And by cloud i mean Google and desktop Microsoft. But you knew that.

GMail has a pretty obvious source of revenue. But more importantly it's hugely strategically valuable. GMail is the #1 reason for people creating Google accounts. Google has a clear desire to have people signed in when performing searches and it lowers the barrier to adoption for it's other products such as Google Plus, Google Docs, etc.

GMail does make some direct revenue for Google (ads and paid storage), but it was (and probably still is) their #1 method for onboarding users to the Google Accounts system. And that gets them access to pay for all sorts of Google products. GMail has been key in growing Google's active user base.

I haven't looked in to this particular instance, but in general...

why buy a company that has no significant revenue? It's not like it's some shock to google - "oh no, meebo doesn't make enough money!?"

So... yeah, the services were provided 'free' in some sense, but meebo was able to continue running before this. Just... yeah.. buy stuff, shut it down.

If it's not a significant source of revenue, it probably doesn't take a significant amount of cash to keep it running for another 6 months to a year.

EDIT: I should have added, I understand the logical reasoning behind buying a company for its assets/talent. Doesn't mean it's not annoying.

> why buy a company that has no significant revenue?

Because users are often just as if not more valuable than the money a company makes. Google probably bought Meebo because they thought the product was a good fit for their new social direction and because it already has a user base.

As far as the services they're shutting down, most of them are in conflict with things Google+ does.

If they are shutting down every user-facing service, how is the userbase relevant?

From the news they're only interested in the Meebo Bar installed base, which are not end-users.

The users are switched to Google services. They'll probably be privately emailed about it.

I believe Meebo was purchased to become part of Google+ not to be an independently operated subsidiary of Google. This shutting down doesn't mean that Meebo will leave the internet space, it just means that the next time we'll see Meebo it'll be with a "Google+" logo on it.

Larry Page has been shutting down and consolidating divisions of Google for the last 18 months. This appears to fit his strategy at the moment. Why pay for two chat divisions?

Why buy a chat service if you already have one?

They wanted the meebobar only, because it's cheaper than building their own, or it's too entrenched to compete against. Those are the only two plausible explanations that would make sense (to me, obviously) but neither actually make much sense when applied to Google.

Userbase, talent, technology. It's surprisingly easy to have a very well put together company that nevertheless is missing some key elements needed for profitability.

According to CrunchBase Meebo took in about 70 million in investment over the course of the company. They started in 2005 and kept growing so you might guess their burn rate is about a million bucks per month. (LinkedIn lists 160 Meebo employees, so a million might even be way low)

Perhaps 6-12 million dollars is insignificant by your standards, but if they don't have the dough then they have to close up shop. You could argue that they could fire everybody and just keep a skeleton crew to keep the site running for a year, probably much cheaper. But what purpose would that serve for them? It would be a dead company at that point.

Why did we started talking about facebook now?

> If you were paying them and they were making a profit then you might have a better chance.

Not necessarily. A non-free service is unlikely to get enough traction to remain alive.

The entire IM client UI was one big ad. I'd be surprised if they couldn't make enough money to run the IM client by plastering a giant Best Buy elf across the screen, especially given that eBuddy makes its money in the same way.

You might find this entertaining - I'm watching a speech by Alan Kay at the moment where he says that computing is more pop-culture than science: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc

You're not serious, are you? What's the average lifetime of a company - 10 years? And since the pace of change keeps accelerating, that means the average life keeps getting shorter (used to be 15 years, etc).

That it's the current unavoidable state of things doesn't make it any better.

I can't count on my fingers the number of services I considered adopting (and vouching for) that were shot down mid-flight in the past year and half. It's getting to hard to trust any business for more than short-term commitment, not just unproven ones.

Well, IRC and email might exist longer then you are old now... (guessing that a lot of people here will be around 20 years old)

When Meebo announced getting bought out my response was:

"Nice, generic and overenthusiastic post-acquisition blog post. They'll likely be shutdown within a few months."

Turns out i was off by a few months in my prediction. I still don't understand what Google acquired through this purchase.

> NOTE: The Meebo Bar will continue to be available to site publishers and will see continued improvements and new features in the weeks and months ahead.

Answers your question, doesn't it? Google acquired them for the Meebo bar; I would put money on it being acquired to become google+ified.

Edit: seems I was incorrect and they were acquired for the team. Disregard this comment.

But you see that was my point. I don't think there is a team or a good product to acquire here. It hardly compares to previous Google's acquisitions.

I guess I no longer need to have an Adblock rule for the Meebo bar that appears on so many websites...

Re-read the link; that's the only service they're keeping.

Direct quote from their site:

> NOTE: The Meebo Bar will continue to be available to site publishers and will see continued improvements and new features in the weeks and months ahead.

now you just need one for Google bar ;)

Good, I've hated the meebo overlay since day 1.

Would you care to say why?

I don't like anything with a fixed position with sole purpose of sharing to social networks. Looks very desperate and blocks the precious vertical pixels. I don't mid fixed stuff on the side of the content, but an overlay you can't scroll off? an immediate turn off.

bad news: that part of meebo isn't going anywhere.

does anyone see a trend? startups' general exit is through acquisition. how can you secure customers when your potential users know that some day, your marginal revenues will require you to exit through acquisition? services getting shutdown shortly after..

While most exits are indeed via acquisition, very few startups actually exit.

that's a great opportunity for any meebo alternative out there because a lot of people were more then happy to use meebo...

Not enough to keep Meebo independent.

What do you mean? They never asked for my money.

Something makes me think what with the amount of investment they got, their aim was an exit, rather than anything to do with customers or users.

I've used https://imo.im/ for a while now. No affiliation other than as a user. The service has worked well for me when I've used it in the past.

I shift to Brosix and I think it is great free IM - http://www.brosix.com

I wonder how long it'll be until we see Meebo integrated into Android and/or Google webapps. I personally think it's sad to see Google buy a company and then shut down it's services.

I guess the 'dont be evil' phase of google is long past huh.

You must be new here. But seriously this is a surprisingly fast phase out with no further announcement from the new owners Google. No publicly stated alternatives or transition plan.

Not sure what "transition plan" they could possibly offer. They only exist as a frontend to other IM services. It takes literally 5 minutes to duplicate 10 IM accounts on another identical service (IMO,ebuddy,trillian,implus).

The only thing they had of value were the logs, and they're giving those out to download.

I'm a skeptic, so I'm inclined to agree. At the same time I'd like to say that we should give it a bit and see where they go with it. Google hasn't been one to remove value that I'm aware of.

Now that Meebo found an exit, they ditch IM users who the acquiring company, Google, does not care either.

Nobody could be blamed. But perhaps one thing meebo could do is to coordinate with meebo messenger alternatives to help users to switch.

Personally I use imo.im. I hope it can stay long and focused. At least so far it has a very IM-focused name. :)

I kind of don't get it. Why do big companies buy other successful companies just to shut it down? Can't they just rebrand it or something? If they can't why even buy? Just for acquiring the technical talent?

That, and heading off future competition. If Google were planning, for example, on releasing a multi-protocol web chat application of their own in the next few weeks, this would be a well-timed move.

Using Meebo's code base to make their own application might have been preferable to rebranding it in this case.

I think that in less than one year we will have a Google+ bar... They bought the bar and the team to integrate Google+ on every website. Google Friendconnect bar + Meebo bar = Google+ bar.

I'm curious to see how Google will integrate it into +

Will they? They already have GTalk. To me it looks like they just wanted to take out competition.

The iPhone imo app should see a surge in downloads.

I think it will stop working too without access to their servers.

If we are all talking about imo[1] I do not believe it will stop working - at least I do not see any connection.

[1] https://imo.im/

Oh, my bad. I took 'imo' as 'in my opinion', and thought the comment was implying lots of people would rush to download Meebo's app before it's discontinued.

IMO Meebo for Android is a really good multi-protocol chat client. A bit like the Pidgin free software for the desktop.

Meebo for iPhone was a good app. Meebo for Android was garbage, unless they updated it last year. It had basically no features. I used it when I first got my phone as it was a name I recognised, but later switched to imo, which is a much better app.

Bummer, was a super useful service. Would be a great benefit to society if they open sourced the messenger.

So Google cuts a head off a popular multi-protocol IM client. I wonder why.

sometimes it's so good to listen to your feeling. I switched from meebo to other chat services very, very long ago.

There's still reddit..

until Google buys them too and shuts them down a month later

Reply on news.ycombinator.com