Instant message service Meebo sees traffic from its embedded chat rooms on Facebook
Meebo, the company that lets you chat to people across instant message services on its site, and across IM services in chat rooms you can embed on the web, also lets third-party developers build applications for its site and use its chat rooms within other sites. What this means is that Meebo users are using Meebo chat rooms within Facebook, to let Facebook users more easily message with each other.
Today, Mountain View, Calif.-based Meebo is offering some new numbers on traffic it is seeing from these applications. Since it first offered the ability for applications to embed Meebo chat rooms in December of 2007, nearly eight million unique Facebook users have visited the rooms, two and a half of which have come in the last 30 days. The company currently claims about 35 million visitors per month, mostly to its chat rooms.
What these stats show is that Meebos’ many application partners — Buddy Media, [Blake] Commagere Ventures, FrozenBear, K-Factor Media, Mesmo TV, Rockstarted, Spicerack Media, Trippert Labs, and Unit 501, (fluff)Friends, RockYou, TheBroth, and WaterCooler — have generated an interesting amount of cross traffic. See grainy sample from Commagere’s Facebook application Vampires, below.
This strikes me as an early-stage promise for how much traffic may one day occur from combining useful web services across large social networks and other sites. But the question that remains for every company mentioned in this article: How can all this traffic make money?
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.