Meebo announces more partners for its new white-label IM service

October 13, 2008 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

Instant message aggregator Meebo is now providing its technology to other sites. Called CommunityIM, the unlaunched service has been racking up an increasingly long list of large and small new partners. Today, the Mountain View, Calif. company is announcing 11 new additions, including IBeatYou, OrangeShark, PerfSpot, UGAME.net, Yaari, Zinch, Zorpia, Bleacher Report, Dhingana, Fanpop and GlobalGrind.

CommunityIM is basically white-label IM. It lets users of a given site chat with friends on that site. It also lets them chat with friends on the major IM providers that Meebo integrates, including AOL’s AIM, Google’s Gtalk, Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger. Partner sites can customize the chat interface to their wishes. Meebo has built CommunityIM using the Jabber IM standard, which will also allow the company to connect users on various partner sites, and on Jabber-supported third-party applications.

The total number of monthly users on these partner sites now adds up to 72.9 million worldwide, according to August comScore traffic numbers cited by the company. The CommunityIM service itself will roll out in stages later this fall.

Meebo, along with social networks like Facebook, has become iconic to pundits who like to criticize web companies with millions of users but no apparently significant revenue streams. Meebo raised $25 million earlier this year, to help tide it over as it figures revenue out. On that front, it has been testing an advertising service it calls SparkAds, where multimedia ads run within parts of the Meebo IM interface. CommunityIM partner sites can run these ads, and split revenue from them with Meebo.

The screenshot below shows how CommunityIM can be integrated into Friendfeed (Friendfeed isn’t actually a partner, what you see is just a demo mockup).

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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.