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Comment by mrchess | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

Meebo bar was truly nasty.

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.

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