Meebo crosses half million users
By Vivek Puri | October 5th, 2006 at 09:41 am ET
Meebo founder Seth has posted on his blog that Meebo now has more than 500,000 registered users. In addition to the registered users, there are many more users who login directly into their IM taking the total number of unique users to 670,000. Meebo had started offering user accounts only 8 months back. Meebo was launched last year in September and quickly got funded by Sequoia in December.
Meebo team has worked really hard in building a scalable and feature rich service in the last one year. Users being able to login into multiple IM clients from the browser made it a great hit with students and people who don’t have access to install IM clients. Meebo has all the bells and whistles of a desktop IM client including sounds, emoticons, add/remove buddy capabilities, tooltips, away messages, ability to sign on/off, add and delete groups……….Best part is that Meebo has seen user growth from all part of world, and not just US which is the case with most of the startups. Recently Meebo introduces its widget, Meebome that can be placed on blogs and websites.
There have been number of other startups in the web-IM area including eBuddy, Radiusim, Meetro, and Gtalkr (bought by Google-closed now), but Meebo has been more successful than any of them.
However Meebo has yet to monetize its operations. Meebo neither jumped on to Google Adsense path nor used any other kind of advertising. Meebo has the potential to go the Userplane way or can also look to offer Meebo Appliance for Small to Medium businesses who than don’t need to spend big dollars on rolling out IM clients.
Tags: StartupSquad, Web2.0, Web_2.0, meebo, IM
