Enabling website owners and bloggers to add chat functionality and drag and drop sharing

Dec 22, 2009 13:11 GMT  ·  By
Enabling website owners and bloggers to add chat functionality and drag and drop sharing
2 photos
   Enabling website owners and bloggers to add chat functionality and drag and drop sharing

The Meebo toolbar you've been seeing adorning the bottom of some larger sites and blogs enabling users to chat with their friends and share content with them is now opening up to anyone. Up till now, only relatively large sites were able to implement the tool, and web masters had no way of adding the functionality by themselves without Meebo's help. Now, everyone can install it with a few lines of code on their blog or website.

"Many users who run their own websites or blogs have been asking if they could get the Meebo Bar as well. Today, we are excited to announce the beta availability of the Meebo Bar for everyone!," Meebo announced. "We can guide you through setting up the Meebo Bar if you have a blog hosted on TypePad or Blogger or if you are hosting your own site using Wordpress or Movable Type. We also support other platforms like Tumblr or any self-hosted site."

The Meebo Bar adds, well, a 'bar' to the bottom of the website which can be customized to add various functionality and buttons. The main feature is the chat tool which enables users to log in and talk to any of their friends on the big number of IM protocols and services Meebo supports. Another important component is the sharing feature which enables users to drag and drop any picture or video and share it with their friends on Twitter, Facebook, email etc.

The tool has been a huge hit for the company which has seen visitor number soar through the roof this year and also started generating some real revenue. To date, over 100 websites have implemented the Bar, but these are all sites with traffic in excess of 1 million unique monthly visitors. Meebo has been focusing on a rather precise slice of the web, large sites, but one that doesn't regularly exceed 20 million visitors a month. This has helped Meebo polish the functionality of the tool while also driving traffic up for its own service. The company is now getting about 100 million unique visitors every month, up from just 30 million at the beginning of the year, thanks in large part to the Community IM project which the Meebo Bar is a part of.

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Enabling website owners and bloggers to add chat functionality and drag and drop sharing
The Meebo Bar website and the bar iself at the bottom
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