Meebo is an impressive breakout from the past few years, they keep pushing the envelope and are really doing an amazing job at finding their revenue stream as well as finding new functionality which brings their users back over and over.
It's funny how little you hear about Meebo compared to say Twitter.
Meebo do a good job in the main, although I'm not convinced Meebo rooms was a good idea.
It's true. Probably because Meebo tends against lock-in and everyone is obsessed with being the next company with lock-in and, therefore, Microsoft-like profits.
Twitter has users with accounts, histories, people they follow. Same with Facebook, MySpace, etc. Meebo can be "easily" replaced by a competitor. Easily in this case means, you don't have to transfer all your data nor do you need to get your friends to move services.
That's why we aren't as giddy about Meebo. They need to keep working really hard to stay one step ahead of the competition. As opposed to Twitter/Facebook/MySpace who have to work just hard enough that users won't take the effort to transfer data and bug their friends to switch to a competitor.
Facebook have shown that IM on websites is really just a commodity at this point. The technology is not the hard part but them owning the social graph is powerful here. I do believe that Facebook Chat will succeed and I think it already is.
However, chat have never been easy to monetize so right now it's adding to the amount of time that users spend on facebook. Which is good
Haha, no way! This is great news. Now, I only wish I had access to my Facebook chat list within my Gmail client. I already have both AIM and GChat rolled into one, and that's great. Then, I just need an iPhone client, and some way to integrate it with both texting and email.
Exchange for chat + email + texting, all specced out with an API for easy integration into browser-side clients...
What's next? Complete interoperability?