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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?

We were hard on instant message startup Meebo in March when it was raising a $25 million round at a $200 million valuation. While it has gained tens of millions of users in a couple of years, it has yet to generate significant revenue.

Today, in one of the Mountain View, Calif. company’s most explicit efforts yet to make money, it is introducing interactive ads.

Meebo’s ads will appear at the bottom of its chat windows (screenshot sample of an ad for the movie The Incredible Hulk, above). Click on an ad that you find interesting and it will expand on to the page, and may include content like a video to watch or a simple video game to play (big screenshot, below). Launch partner advertisers include Havaianas, Sony Electronics, Universal Pictures, and the rock band Weezer.

Meebo says more than 75 million web site URLs are shared on it every month — people sending web links to each other on its services. So if the ads appeal to users, the ads will be shared, it hopes. The result is that advertisers will have a clear new channel for spreading information virally. Most social network advertising to date has been untargeted banner ads that aren’t worth much to anybody.

If you want to share an ad, you can add a link to the ad within your chat window (see screenshot). The ads will also run on Meebo Rooms, chat room widgets that you embed on other sites. Note that users in these rooms make up most of Meebo’s 35 million monthy unique visitors.

Meebo has previously been working on partnerships with music labels, with video ad network company Videoegg and others to sell advertising. It has most recently been expanding its sales team. The company hasn’t released financials, but last we heard, it wasn’t seeing significant revenue.

The larger trend, as we’ve covered, is that social networks and other web services are trying to figure out how they can connect brand advertisers with their millions of users. If it turns out that Meebo users — the majority of whom are teenagers or twentysomethings — do like to share these ads, then Meebo may start making some serious money. Advertisers are looking for more precise ways of reaching these younger audiences. Social networks and social services like Meebo replace time spent watching TV or reading the newspaper, but brand advertising on these sites has until recently been limited to poorly-performing banner ads.

And so, if Meebo’s effort works, it will likely be duplicated and iterated upon by other social services that provide IM. For example, Facebook’s own IM service, only recently launched, could likely run similar ads.

VentureBeat threw a party last night to celebrate the launch our new digital media blog. (In truth, the blog is still a glorified tab on our main site, but we’re headed soon to a more separate offering.)

Held at the Ambassador club in San Francisco, hundreds of movers and shakers in digital media arena showed up — entrepreneurs, PR folks, even Warriors basketball star Baron Davis (below), an investor in IBeatYou (which also had an announcement at the event).

Kara Swisher, who runs the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD, showed up and took some footage, and writes a post here. See video below.

People in the video talk about this being the “surest sign there’s a bubble.” But thankfully, Kara comes back to interview me, and I tried to explain other reasons why that may not be the case. Had I been more articulate, I would have gone into more depth about why exactly some of these new media companies are creating so much value. Companies like Adify are creating sensible, targeted networks that advertisers want. Music, TV and gaming, and social communication are all being transformed too — there’s plenty of opportunity. Although its true I’m a skeptic about some of the frothy financings that are happening, and have to eat my hat from time to time.

Finally, I’d like to thank VentureBeat’s business manager, Jacob Mullins, who brought in the sponsors who made it all possible to have the fun last night. Many thanks to Sun Microsystems, venture capital firm Mohr Davidow Ventures and law firm O’Melveny & Myers.

Below are a few of Brian Solis‘ great shots. Check out the rest of his set here.

[Above: Baron Davis speaks to the crowd as Matt Marshall (right) looks on.]

[Above: Dan Farber of CNET.]

[Above: Three partygoers having fun.]

[Above: Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and guest.]

[Above: The VentureBeat team.]

[(CC) Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com, bub.blicio.us.]

VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall would write this post but he’s busy getting ready to eat his hat.

Last month, we learned that instant message company Meebo was working on raising a round that would value it at up to $250 million. At the time, Marshall wrote: “I’m quite ready to eat my hat, if this funding happens,” because recession concerns have made investors more concerned about putting money into companies like Meebo that are still working out their revenue models.

Well, the funding appears to have happened. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company has raised $20 million on a $200 million valuation, according to Techcrunch, and was assisted by boutique investment bank Montgomery & Co. Before this story broke, a Meebo representative had contacted us to let us know that it has an announcement for tonight — which I assume is this funding news. We’ll keep you updated.

[Updated. The actual amount raised was $25 million, according to the company, and investors include lead JAFCO Ventures, with Time Warner Investments, KTB Ventures, and existing investors Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) participating. The company currently claims more than 30 million users a month.]

Rumors that the round was nearing closure have been dogging the company since earlier this month. Meebo had talked to some companies about selling, from what we’ve heard, but instead it recently hired a chief revenue officer to help it make money on its own. The company is experimenting with ads that appear within its various instant message services, including ads that appear on its IM aggregation service on its home site, as well as in its chat rooms that you can embed on other sites.

The funding, if true, puts Meebo among the class of Silicon Valley consumer web companies that similarly have many millions of users, but don’t make so many millions of dollars. This is a trend we’ve been writing about for a number of months, most notably starting with widget-maker Slide’s $50 million round in December (announced in January) that valued it at $550 million. Some other web companies still pounding the street: Slide rival RockYou is also apparently working on a round, as is messaging service Twitter; meanwhile, social network Digg is still maybe going to sell for a couple hundred million. Of course, when it comes large amounts of web funding, Meebo is dwarfed by social network creator Ning’s recent $60 million round and the $430 million raised by Chinese social network Xiaonei.

Meebo has previously raised $12.5 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Sequoia Capital.

Instant-message startup Meebo is closing a round that will value it at between $175 million and $200 million, according to a Techcrunch rumor, which says the company has only made $1 million since launching in 2005. And the company’s announcement today that it’s hired a veteran advertising executive, Carter Brokaw, to be its chief revenue officer seems to lend credence to that rumor.

A few weeks ago, we reported that Mountain View, Calif.-based Meebo was aiming to raise $20 million to $30 million at a valuation somewhere between $200 million and $250 million, with the assistance of investment bank Montgomery & Co.

Meebo’s site lets you chat with friends across competing IM services like AIM and Yahoo Messenger. It more recently launched a chat room feature, where you can embed a group chat widget on other sites around the web. The site has nearly 30 million monthly users, between its various services.

We’d heard that Facebook and MySpace had both looked at buying Meebo, and passed. Techcrunch adds that eBay and AOL also thought about buying it, although MySpace owner Fox and AOL may be participating in this round as strategic investors.

The explanation for Meebo’s low revenue is that it has been focused on rolling out new products that have allowed it to keep growing.

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting interview with the company that examines how it plans to start making money. Next month, it will begin introducing ads into its services that are essentially invites to sponsored media — videos, polls, quizzes, etc. — targeted according to a user’s demographic information and behavior. There will even be a leaderboard displaying the most popular ads. The company says that in tests, it is experiencing engagement rates of up to four percent, which is much higher than what an un-targeted banner ad might see.

Enter Brokaw, a long-time ad exec at CNET, and more recently Warner. Meebo is hoping to go as far as offering consulting services to top ad agencies. Brokaw, who will be based in New York, will be leading Meebo’s charge into Madison Avenue — he has the opportunity to prove that IM can be a big business.

Frank Quattrone is back as a banker — Quattrone and associates are starting a new boutique investment banking firm, called Qatalyst Group. During the (last) bubble in the ’90s, Quattrone was a top deal-maker, helping many promising (and unpromising) startups of the era go public. Some of his more illustrious clients included Amazon, Cisco Systems, and Netscape. After that bubble burst, he spent years fighting legal charges that he had somehow misled consumers about his clients’ viability in public markets. The charges ultimately didn’t stick. Now, Qatalyst is hoping to help modern-day startups to take advantage of their explosive success over the past few years. Rivals like Allen & Co., Montgomery & Co. as well as larger banks, have already been doing that — and now there’s a downturn in the economy, which will make both late-staging funding and liquidity events less likely. Then again, Quattrone has impressive connections and experience. Here’s what Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told Dow Jones about the news: “The launch of Qatalyst is an important development for the technology industry. Frank and his team bring unparalleled industry knowledge, a unique 25-year market perspective and candid, insightful judgment that CEOs greatly value on important strategic initiatives.” The New York Times has more (and was the source of Quattrone’s photo, to the left).

LiveJournal community upset, but the issue isn’t censorship by its new Russian owners — When SUP bought LiveJournal, the social network/blog site with a large Russian audience, last year, we were concerned that censorship might ensue. LiveJournal has become a main forum for dissent against the Russian government, and the new Russian owner, SUP, has tight connections to the country’s not-so-press-friendly government.

There don’t seem to have been any censorship issues so far, but there’s another issue that’s possibly just as shocking to freetards everywhere: SUP has tried to charge for new accounts that aren’t otherwise ad-supported, a change it announced last week. Yes, SUP wants to make money from its new purchase. It is still learning about dealing with its vocal user base, apparently, as it has since apologized for not clearly discussing the changes beforehand (even the web-celebrity American advisory board wasn’t well-notified). Here’s to LiveJournal democracy.

“By 2050 solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions” — Science-tech publication Scientific American has offered up a “grand plan” for how it could all happen. Take a look for yourself.

Yahoo VP joins Internet ad start-up — Greg Coleman has been named chief executive of search advertising start-up Netseer, after leaving his spot as Yahoo’s chief of global ad sales at the end of February. Netseer seems to be a small player in a very crowded field, but in a conversation with VentureBeat, Coleman said he was impressed by the Los Angeles-based start-up’s technology, as well as its founders’ vision. The company isn’t revealing too many details about that technology yet, but Coleman said Netseer has “mapped the Internet differently” and uses that data to make advertising more effective. For example, Netseer discovered that “cognac” and “Cuban cigars” often show up on web pages together, and could use that information to deliver targeted ads. Hopefully, it will become more clear in the next few months how Netseer stands out. Coleman’s move definitely got our attention.

AdMob’s latest stats on its mobile traffic, worldwide — The mobile advertising company has recently started publishing its own traffic numbers. It has seen a slowdown in the US market, compared to its recent numbers, but its still seeing solid growth in the UK. You can get the full report here.

Blog and media search engine BlogDigger bought by Sonic Mountain — Blogdigger began life five years ago as a tool for searching blogs using their RSS feeds, but it has since diversified to searching a broader set of media content. It will now be part of the digital media offerings of Sonic Mountain — the company that bought Odeo last year and plans to relaunch it in April. Odeo, as some may recall, is the podcasting company started by Blogger founder Evan Williams through his incubator company Obvious (which has also created the more successful Twitter). ReadWriteWeb has the scoop here.

How Meebo could make money? — We’ve wondered how IM service Meebo, which is in the process of raising a very large round of funding, could make money. PaidContent has answers: The company is looking at advertising (it has previously told us it sees a higher-than-average response to its ads featured within its chat windows) as well as virtual goods.

Meebo, the site that lets users send instant messages from a single page — across various IM platforms — is trying to raise $25-$30 million at a nose-bleed valuation of between $200 million and $250 million, I’m hearing from multiple sources. This is quadruple its valuation from its previous round of between $60-$70 million last year, and a big bet that its fast-growing user base is worth something.

(Readers, let us know what you think in the poll, to the right)

Mountain View, Calif.- based Meebo has hired a San Francico bank, Montgomery & Co to shop the deal. We’ve heard that two, possibly three, larger strategic investors — and these may include Facebook and MySpace — have expressed interest, though things are moving quickly, and one of them may have backed off.

I’m quite ready to eat my hat, if this funding happens. I wrote last week that the market had changed considerably over the past few months, and that Meebo wouldn’t be able to raise money at the stratospheric rates it might have done last year — because of the evaporation of interest from hedge funds. That analysis hasn’t changed. But there’s apparently still interest from some strategic investors. If Meebo pulls this off, its a great story, an even greater one than Bebo selling itself to AOL last week for $850 million. Note: Bebo was represented by Montgomery & Co. rival bank Allen & Co., which also represents other consumer-facing startups like Digg and Slide.

However, the value is surprisingly high because Meebo is a mere messaging service that hasn’t proven yet that it can make good money. The site’s core service lets you chat across competing instant message services, including AIM, Gtalk, Yahoo Messenger and Microsoft messenger, but other companies also offer that service. The company is now starting to focus on making money. In the past year, it has started relationships with a number of music labels and other partners, and also works with video advertising service company VideoEgg. It’s hard to predict the value of Meebo’s business model, especially in the short-term where advertising and other forms of making money in social site like social networks — or Meebo — has come harder than some expected.

Of course, this also comes at a time when the consumer economy has taken a hit, resulting in even large banks like Bear Sterns getting sold for far less than their previous values. Some investors remain quite skeptical about Meebo.

On the other hand, Meebo has some things going for it. It has attracted 29 million monthly unique users worldwide. While other chat services abound, Meebo has done an especially good job at executing to make its service very simple to use. It has rolled out other compelling products too, such as Meebo rooms (like the one we embedded beneath the article), which has been growing quickly, as well as its smaller developer platform. In fact, Meebo won “best consumer startup” at The Crunchies award ceremony in January: An important factor was that its rooms grew to more than 20 million users since the service launched last May.

More generally, there may also be more competition — if not consolidation — among instant messaging services. We’ve heard that Facebook is working on its own IM service, we’ve also heard that Facebook has looked at buying AIM from AOL, although this sounds highly unlikely considering that Facebook likes to create products rather than buy them. And, now that AOL is integrating Bebo’s social network with AIM, this sounds even more ludicrous.

The banker, Montgomery, has requested that all offers be in by Wednesday, and has told investors it has several parties interested at a valuation of $200 million. We’ve heard different things about who is interested. We’ve heard that at least one, possibly two, of the strategic investors isn’t interested in sharing the investment, preferring instead to buy Meebo entirely. We haven’t confirmed that. Montgomery is reportedly holding out for a separate venture investor, in order to help set the price of the round, at which the strategic investor or investors would also invest.

Eric Eldon contributed to this article.

Clouds are gathering over Silicon Valley’s consumer internet companies. The sale of social networking company Bebo (our coverage) comes at a time when private investors are changing their tune. They’re no longer pumping money into start-ups at the same huge valuations they were doing last year.

Until January, life was groovy as an internet start-up. Over the past 18 months, hedge funds and other large investors eagerly swooped in and invest hordes of cash into consumer internet companies that showed growth in users — start-ups like Slide, Ning and Zillow. Many of these start-ups were making next to no real revenue at all. But the hedge funds were so flush with cash, they aggressively set the pricing of deals, bidding up the valuations of private companies — expecting revenues would come later. They effectively shut out venture capitalists from investing. For example, companies like Slide and Ning drew backers like T Rowe Price and Legg Mason, which injected tens of millions of dollars at valuations in the several hundreds of millions (our coverage of Slide and coverage of Ning, respectively), far outbidding more cost-conscious venture firms.

However, since January, interest from a key group of investors, the hedge funds, has evaporated — almost overnight. With the economy tottering and the credit crunch hitting home, hedge funds such as Artis (which set off the hedge fund binge in the first place, when it backed YouTube, showing hedge funds could make money from start-ups), Galleon and Integral, have shut their faucets. These firms have many of their assets in public stocks, and with stocks declining, they’re reluctant to look at anything that is more than a year way from having a clear shot at going public — meaning few Internet companies in Silicon Valley.

Case in point: Meebo, the site that lets people use a single sign-on to IM across different platforms. It’s got user traction, but its no where close to going public, and has minimal revenues. That company has been on the road trying to raise $20 million, we’ve been told, but it hasn’t drawn the inflated valuation offers of yesterday.

(By the way, we reported earlier about the rush by other start-ups to go out and raise cash before things got ugly; turns out, they were smart.)

Meantime, other large investors, such as T Rowe Price, AllianceBernstein and Legg Mason, which place huge amounts of money (some of the manage hundred of billions of dollars, if not trillions) in the initial public offerings, have also tightened their habits. They haven’t turned away from private companies, but they’re only backing companies close to going public, two years out or less. They backed Slide and Ning because those companies are run by seasoned entrepreneurs. Going forward, with markets the way they are, they won’t be backing any more Slides or Nings, as those companies are still very early. Allen & Co, the New York investment bank, initially acted as a broker for some of these bigger investment companies, hooking them up to Silicon Valley deals, but we’re being told it is having trouble drumming up interest these days.

That’s not to say that a company like Meebo is in trouble. Venture capitalists are still eager to back companies with traction, and some of them learned that downturns are the best time to invest in private companies — precisely because valuations come down, and they know they’ll get a better return when markets improve. Meebo raised money last year, and it is still seeing solid growth in its userbase, with some 29 million unique visitors last month across its networks. It will likely raise cash soon, but it probably won’t be at the stratospheric levels of 2007. Meebo’s Seth Sternberg declined to comment on his fund-raising plans.

Meebo Rooms, the chat room service offered by IM company Meebo, is experiencing eye-popping growth. After just seven months, its attracting well over twice the monthly unique users that Meebo’s own web site gets. And Meebo’s own site is no slouch.

People apparently want to IM with each other on sites across the web. You’ve long heard that destination sites are no longer “in,” and Meebo’s experience is a confirmation of that.

Rooms, which you can can embed on another site, was launched last May. Together with Meebo ME, the Mountain View, Calif.’ company’s IM widget for only one-to-one (not group) chat, the two services brought in 19.7 million unique monthly visitors in October, according to Comscore. The vast majority of that traffic comes from Rooms.

Meanwhile, the company’s core home page service, which lets you create a Meebo IM identity that syncs with AIM, Yahoo and other IM services, has grown to near seven million unique monthly visitors, according to the company. Meebo’s most active users are still on this home page service. Note: Meebo’s internal count of its widgets is actually lower than Comscore’s. The graph below, from the company’s internal data, shows only 24 million total unique visitors, including Meebo, Rooms, and Meebo ME.

Meebo also introduced a developer platform so other companies can offer games and other applications within Meebo’s services. That only launched at the end of October (our coverage), and is a work in progress, Meebo tells us. So far, there are more than 400 registered third-party applications using the platform.

Rooms are showing up in more places. RockYou, the widget-maker on Myspace and application-maker on Facebook, uses Meebo rooms in its Horoscopes and Vampires applications on Facebook. That service was introduced last month. Rooms is also offered on these applications on Bebo, via Bebo’s developer platform.

Meebo, however, is still figuring out how to make money. It already has paying partnerships with a few advertisers, including record labels, CBS and Puma. Some early good news on that front: people are ten to 20 times more likely to click on a Meebo ad than a standard banner ad, because, the company says, the Meebo ad is integrated closely into the IM services. This year, the company plans to focus on building out its sales staff and bringing in more advertising deals.

The company has been focused on growth in more than one way. I first visited their offices this spring — the top floor of a small office building in downtown Mountain View — and it was mostly empty. When I stopped by the company’s offices today, its many new hires were packed in, without space to spare.

Meebo, the cross-platform instant messaging company, has built a Meebo Rooms widget especially for Facebook applications, which it makes available today.

It is significant because it could help make applications on Facebook more social, thanks to real-time communication. However, it will also let people chat using their real names, and these conversations can be found by search engines — and so will test anew the Facebook community’s tolerance of such things (privacy, in case you haven’t noticed, has been hotly debated recently on Facebook).

Meebo, though still young, is gaining clout. The company reports usage of its service is growing strongly.

It now says 16.5 million people a month use Meebo Rooms, a service introduced in May (see our coverage), which allows chat conversations to occur off its site. However, that number may be somewhat inflated because it counts people who have landed on a third-party Web page with Meebo Rooms embedded in it, but who may not have interacted with the service.

In any case, even if you cut that number in half, the growth is still significant, because the company in recent months referred to having 6.5 million unique users directly to its own site.

Meebo’s popularity stems from letting people instant message with others from a single online page, even if they’re using different services (AIM, Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc). It doesn’t require any software downloads, so students, in particular find it convenient to use when they login from any computer they happen to be using at school. However, they can now just as easily do this from other sites. The Meebo Rooms widget can be embedded in any site across the Web, and is popular at places like MySpace.

The Meebo Rooms widget for Facebook applications is called “Partner Edition.” The company launches with partners including BuddyMedia, (fluff)Friends and Watercooler. See image below for an example of how it looks within the Acebucks application.

Martin Green, Meebo’s VP of Business, told VentureBeat that chat in Facebook is unique because people chat with their real names, as provided by Facebook. The idea is that people behave differently when they are representing their true selves.

At launch, Rooms on Facebook do not include ad space, but Green said Meebo will add one early next year. The idea is Meebo wants to build a standard ad unit, as we reported here.

Other features of Meebo Rooms Partner Edition include brand design customization, automatic creation of new rooms when capacity is reached, advertising tracking for the ad unit (starting early next year), and traffic and data reporting to determine campaign success.

Chats on Rooms in Facebook, like other sponsored Rooms, will be recorded and available to be indexed by search engines. What’s different this time is that transcripts of Facebook chat will contain users’ real names, whereas most Rooms to date have been with anonymous names or screen names, with the exception of select deals like with VH1.

This raises a question about user privacy because chats occurring inside Facebook are attributed to the person typing it, and these chats can be discovered now by anyone Googling the person’s name. Green pointed out there is a disclosure explaining the indexing. Green also said privacy has not become an issue with other indexed chats. He said that users chatting in groups have the expectation that their comments will be read by strangers in the chat room, and by extension it’d be ok to make those chats available to people searching the web. However, recent incidents may contradict Green’s view. For example, some users of public IRC channels, while knowing that anyone could read their chats, were shocked to find out that they were being indexed for search engines.

It remains to be seen how users respond to chat indexed with their real names. But the move is interesting, because it marks Meebo’s first major effort to develop for Facebook and could help make applications on Facebook more social thanks to real-time communication. Chatting with people using their real names creates an opportunity for higher quality conversation than anonymous conversations.

A final note on the Meebo’s user numbers. Meebo has drawn users with Meebo Rooms because it automatically offers accounts to new visitors who previously haven’t used the service. However, as mentioned above, some of those 16.5 million users spend time chatting, others watch and others don’t interact with Rooms at all because they don’t notice it or are on the page for reasons other than chatting.

[Disclosure: Doug Sherrets owns a small number of Facebook shares. He is a contributing author at VentureBeat. He recently started working at Slide.]

Meebo, the Silicon Valley company that lets you message across multiple IM services from a single Web site, is taking significant pains to make money from its millions of users.

Last month, it launched a way for outside developers to produce games and other content to be offered on the site, allowing them to keep half the revenue. A few weeks later, the Mountain View company gave the developers an option to run their own advertising and keep all the revenue.

Now, there’s a third part to the plan. Meebo has partnered with online video advertising VideoEgg to let third-party application developers run overlay ads from VideoEgg’s advertising network. The ads appear over the bottom part of videos, games and voice applications.

Application owners will keep half the revenue from these ads, while Meebo and VideoEgg will split the other half.

Since its launch, Meebo Platform has attracted more than 300 applications. More than 40 applications can be used by more than two people in real-time. Companies developing apps include TokBox, Mochi Media, Kongregate, ustream.tv and TalkShoe.

VideoEgg said Meebo’s high engagement — one million users spend more than 2.5 hours on the site each day — is a good fit for its so called EggNetwork, which reaches over 50 million users. The more you use an application, the more you’ll see these ads. VideoEgg advertisers include over one hundred Fortune 500 companies, it says.

As reported two weeks ago, Meebo is busy building an ad unit it hopes will be a standard, as recognized by the IAB. The idea is a standardized ad unit makes it easy for advertisers to buy ads across multiple sites.

The ad unit Meebo described — a small icon, a headline, a description, and a link — is different from unit used by VideoEgg.

Meebo’s deal with VideoEgg appears to be an intermediate step: Plug in ads from a proven brand ad player like VideoEgg, then get working on building out Meebo’s own ad solution.

The first screenshot below shows an example of a VideoEgg ad. The second screenshot shows what happens when you click the ad.

updated
Meebo, the online instant messaging company, has been picking up users at a rapid rate, breezing along with high-profile backing by VC firm Sequoia Capital.

But its move today to deliver games on its platform is its most ambitious move yet to take it from a comfortable, small startup into the big-leagues where “the rest of us” will finally hear about it. It is also allowing game makers to insert ads, and make money from them.

Today Meebo releases more than 20 games from 14 partners, including chess, poker, puzzle and other popular casual games, for its users to play. Meebo is well-suited for games because it has something called “presence,” meaning Meebo users can tell when IM buddies are online and can invite them to play games right away.

Meebo first made the first step last month, when it opened itself to developers to create applications. The company plans other application categories — in shopping, work, music and video. Since launch, more than 200 developers have created Meebo applications.

In fact, Meebo also announced today that all application developers can sell their own ads for their applications. The other option is that developers can elect to share revenue 50/50 with Meebo. Mochi Media, an ad network company that makes money by embedding ads inside games, is launching a game on the platform. Gaming site Kongregate is also a launch partner.

Meebo seeks to create a standardized ad unit that would include a small icon, a headline, a description, and a link, according to Martin Green, Meebo’s VP of business. Meebo already runs ads similar to this on their front page. The idea is that standardized ad sizes make it easier for advertisers to build an ad and display it across many different websites. Meebo is still working on the exact design of the ad unit.

As I wrote here, making games available to Meebo users enables spontaneous game play among friends that is not available on casual gaming sites. That is, playing games on Meebo means you play with friends, instead of with strangers. This is important for two reasons. First, playing games with friends is generally more desirable than playing with strangers. Second, the implication is that Meebo could spur “social gaming” amongst friends, something that until now has been constrained because it is harder to coordinate visiting a casual gaming site with friends than simply IM’ing buddies invites to play.

Here’s how games could drive Meebo growth. Meebo users can now invite any IM buddies to play games, including non-Meebo users. The invite arrives as an IM and contains a link to a Meebo.com page where the game is played, just like other Meebo Platform apps. Non-members click through, and suddenly they’re on the platform. Those new users can decide whether to return to Meebo. The enticement will increase as engaging applications are built.

If it hasn’t occurred to you yet, we’ll say it: This is beginning to sound a lot like Facebook.

The bottom of the Google Trends graph compares press mentions of Facebook and Meebo (Facebook is in blue and Meebo is in red). Mentions in May for Facebook (when Facebook’s platform launched) far outnumber those for Meebo in the past few weeks since its platform launched.

Facebook is a year older than Meebo and, according to Green, Facebook is also only a year ahead of Meebo in terms of user growth — suggesting he thinks Meebo in a year can become as big and relevant as Facebook is today. Making that comparison is a bit premature. Facebook has transformed itself from a possible Yahoo acquisition target into a standalone private company considered a potential threat to Google. Part of Facebook’s explosive growth can be attributed to the fact the company opened up to all users a year ago, whereas before then the site was limited to college, work and high school users. In contrast, Meebo has been available to any users since it launched. Facebook currently has 54 million active monthly users, whereas Meebo has 6 million unique monthly users.

Meebo users typically stay on Meebo.com, while only occasionally refreshing the page, whereas Facebook users generate over 65 billion page views per month, meaning there are more pages and places for Facebook to serve ads than Meebo. That said, Meebo users tend to stay on the Meebo.com page, creating an opportunity to show new ads in regular intervals. Also, Meebo users do not maintain profiles like users do on Facebook.

By the end of this year, Meebo plans to release its own version of Facebook’s news feed, according to Green. The feed might list activities of IM buddies such as which Meebo applications they use and other activity information — which could drive usage of Meebo app’s.

Building a news feed on Meebo will require introducing a whole new set of behaviors to Meebo users. If Meebo users get annoyed, leaving Meebo can be as easy as logging into an AIM, MSN or Yahoo IM client instead. In other words, maintaining a high quality user experience is essential.

Might Facebook try to replicate Meebo’s strength by enabling real-time applications sharing “presence” information with Facebook developers? For now, Facebook can only offer real-time interaction if friends happen to be using the same app at the same time. Facebook lets you see which friends were “recently online,” but doesn’t let you do real-time chat. Enabling real-time chat and presence throughout the Facebook site might require a significant development effort by Facebook. Facebook could also build its own version of Meebo inside Facebook. The idea is Facebook users doing IM’ing inside Facebook could increase time spent on the site and be another potential growth mechanism by giving Facebook a chance to attract Facebook users’ IM buddies who aren’t currently using the site.

This would expand upon Facebook’s existing deal with AIM, which lets Facebook users invite friends to Facebook by sending out IMs.

[Disclosure: Doug Sherrets owns a small number of Facebook shares.]

Facebook is in blue, Meebo is in red.

Instant messaging service Meebo has opened its platform to third party developers, which will put it in competition with Facebook, Google and other communications platforms. The new applications on Meebo already include voice and video services.

We wrote last week, here, that Meebo had a great opportunity to become a platform. It’s an instant messaging service that lets people IM across multiple protocols, including AIM, Yahoo, Gtalk and MSN. It’s web-based, requiring no download. It has introduced group chat rooms, widgets and other features in an effort to combine real-time collaboration with social networking.

Meebo Platform could yield useful applications not available on Facebook because Meebo is built on real-time interaction whereas Facebook is an asynchronous communication tool.

Meebo’s platform will include application programming interfaces to give developers access to user data. It is working with four partners, announced at the company’s two-year anniversary party tonight.

Tokbox is providing video chat between users, with Ustream for one-to-many live video broadcasting, Pudding Media for one-to-one VoIP calls and TalkShoe for online conference calls.

As I wrote last week, compelling applications built for Meebo could pull in non-Meebo users. The switching costs from an IM client like AIM to Meebo is low because Meebo has many of the same features.

RockYou CTO and co-founder Jia Shen said he believes the IM friend list represents a more intimate and accurate social graph than what Facebook or MySpace have. That’s because it’s more likely to contain friends and contacts that a person actually interacts with. Shen said that it would be hard for other platforms to replicate the real-time nature of the Meebo Platform. RockYou is working on Meebo applications.

At the launch event, Sequoia VC and Meebo investor Roelof Botha said people evaluating Meebo should consider its reach is not confined to its more than 6 million monthly users spending on average 40 minutes per day on the site. In all, Meebo accesses presence information of tens of millions of people on Meebo users’ buddy lists. This reach provides expansion room and an opportunity for developers to reach millions more users via buddy lists.

The applications already available on the platform can used without requiring logging into Meebo, but it does require visiting a Meebo link. Future applications like games might require logging into Meebo, building user lock-in. Meebo could build a sustainable competitive advantage with network effects, as users and their friends adopt more applications. For example, if a group of friends rely on TokBox on Meebo for video chat, why switch to something else when you rely on connecting with your friends using Meebo applications?

In particular, switching costs could be high for users leaving Meebo applications that build on or rely on stored past activity.

Developers will be able to monetize the application. Meebo will sell ads directly into the applications and keep half the revenue.

It will also have third parties offer office, casual games, e-commerce and other applications.

Applications will need to rely on Flash or Javascript. Developers can sign up here to participate.

The company has grown quickly since it launched. Now, it says more than six million people log in monthly, with more than one million people spending up to two and a half hours logged in every day.

Meebo is backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Sequoia Capital.

[Disclosure: Doug Sherrets owns a small number of Facebook shares.]

Meebo, provider of a popular instant messaging service, is unveiling a useful service tonight: File sharing.

The Mountain View company is letting users share files with each other, from office documents to photos to music.

Any file under ten megabytes is fair game, although each user is restricted to 30 megabytes per month, and Meebo stores files for only four hours after they’re sent.

As the school year gets going, this service could be a hit.

High school and college students are already some of the most active users of the service. It lets them IM with each other across IM protocols — including AOL’s AIM, Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk — from its web browser. This useful when places like school libraries won’t let students download IM software to their desktop.

More than 6 million people use Meebo per month, and the median age is 21, the company says. Almost every user is between ages 14 and 29. More than 140 million messages are sent through Meebo daily, with about 20 million of those going through Meebo Rooms, its chat room service.

The file-sharing service works two different ways. If you’re using Meebo’s own chat protocol, simply click the file-sharing icon in the Meebo chat window, upload the file, and hit return to send. Your friend will see an icon of the file in their chat window that they click on to begin downloading it (screenshot to the left).

The company has a necessary but slightly less convenient solution for sharing files with people using Meebo to chat via other IM protocols. If you’re say, chatting with a friend on AIM, your friend will receive a web link to a Meebo page they can download the file from (screenshot below).

The service uses Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services for storing and retrieving files online. It is currently available for Internet Explorer and Firefox, although it plans to support Safari soon.

Meebo, an instant messaging service, has grown 354 percent between now and ten months ago, according to Nielsen (pdf). Perhaps this is no surprise, considering the range of viral products it has been releasing, such as its embeddable chat rooms.

Other Silicon Valley tech companies also have fast-growing services. One is Google’s GTalk, at 149 percent, which integrates IM with Gmail. The other is IMVU.

IMVU is more similar to virtual worlds like Habbo Hotel or Second Life. It lets you create a cartoon avatar for your IM conversations, featuring virtual clothes and other goods — some of which are very revealing.

You start out with a free set of clothes and some furniture, then buy your way up. Then, you get to chat with your friends in what the company describes as “killer 3D scenes.” It requires a software download to run, and registration.

Someone has posted a YouTube video here, however, that depicts how IMVU users customize their clothes and their rooms. It also reflects how the company uses sexy-looking avatars to make itself more attractive to its teenage audience — so much so that this video was tagged by YouTube users as being too racy for those under 18.

Judging from some home-made clips also available on YouTube, users are taking their experiences on the site pretty seriously. That’s another good sign for the company.

Meebo, a web service that lets you use different instant messaging services from a single page, has been busy working to monetize their month-old IM chat room feature (our previous coverage here).

Partners using Meebo’s online chat rooms on their Web sites (using an embedded Meebo widget) can now run their own advertising within Meebo’s rooms, and track performance: Partners’ ads will appear within a player that carries the media files — a so-called “queue” because it is a listing of file URLs. The files are video, audio and photos shared by a room’s users.

The service is intended for general use, although Meebo has announced an impressive list of musicians and labels that have jumped on the bandwagon (see the lengthy list below). But for these partners, there’s one big obstacle to making money from the Meebo service: Many of these artists carry their chats on musician-popular MySpace, and that site doesn’t allow advertising.

Meebo says it lets artists decide where they put their Meebo chat room widgets, and those artists know about the no-advertising policy on MySpace. So it’s unclear how popular the service will become. People pay a fee to Meebo for use of the service.

Partners can provide their own “skins,