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meebo now on YES network (and why you should care)

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I know, I know — not everyone is as big a fan of the New York Yankees as I am. So, even though I’m excited to tell you about our latest Meebo Bar launch with YES Network, this blog post is about much more than that—it’s about you, the fans!

First, the announcement: The Meebo Bar is now live on the Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network (YES), the official cable network of the Yankees and the New Jersey Nets basketball team. If you visit http://www.yesnetwork.com, Meebo helps you send images and stories to your friends, read related Twitter feed posts, or become a fan on Facebook.

Now, for the other important part of the post:

The Meebo Bar now reaches over 160 million people around the world! We have partnerships with all kinds of sites—entertainment, tech, news, social networks—but we’re just starting a bigger push to reach sports-related sites.

If you want your favorite sports team or league to get the Meebo Bar, please give us suggestions. Better yet, send them a quick email telling them you’d like to see it on their site. That way, when we call them, they’ll know their fans are fans of Meebo, too.

We’re working very hard to bring you innovative and user-friendly solutions that improve the quality of your browsing and social experience all around the Web. Thank you for your support!

Mikey

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meebo on “the ultimate guys’ guide” maxim.com

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One of the coolest things about my role as a technical account manager here at Meebo is getting to work with some of the world’s foremost web publishers. It’s always fun to see and hear a person’s reaction when s/he first realizes all the features that the Meebo Bar brings to a Web site. “That’s so cool!” is a common refrain. :) From sharing tools, to buttons, to instant messaging functionality, the Bar delivers a lot of value to publishers and audiences.

Speaking of foremost web publishers, you may have heard of a men’s interest magazine called Maxim. They bill themselves as “the ultimate guys’ guide,” and we aren’t going to disagree with them. We’re thrilled to tell you that Maxim.com has just launched the Meebo Bar, making it easy for you to share jokes, games, videos, music and sports news with your friends through any of your social networks. Click here to check out this month’s cover girl or featured music artists–and if you’d like, Stumble it, Digg it, or share with your friends!

- Matt

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slate.com: now with the meebo bar

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As you may have noticed, we’ve been working ’round the clock to get new publishers set up with the Meebo Bar. Meebo is now live on some of the world’s largest web properties, and our once “little” company is fast becoming a household name with widely-recognized, widely-used products. It’s been really exciting to witness such exponential growth firsthand!

More and more people are using Meebo across the web. We’re really excited to announce our newest partner to launch the Meebo Bar: Slate.com. You can now use Meebo to share to friends on any of your social networks while browsing Slate’s blogs and articles. Click here to check it out when you have a chance!

- Ryan

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A Faster Bar — A Better User Experience

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No one likes to wait. Whether it’s in line for coffee, stuck in traffic, or on-line waiting for a web page to load, waiting does not make for a great experience. In fact, performance is such an important ingredient to a user’s experience on a website that the Google User Experience team named “fast” as one of their 10 fundamental design principles for a great experience.

At Meebo we are constantly thinking about performance. We know that our Meebo Bar adds value to any publisher’s web site (sharing, notifications, custom applications, instant messaging, and an engaging advertising platform). But we also know that any third-party plugin will affect page performance.

In the upcoming version 10 of the Meebo Bar we took a step back and looked at our underlying architecture. First, we rebuilt the bar out of smaller components. This led to a simpler, more compartmentalized model. In addition to improving performance, our new architecture ensures additional privacy for our users. Next we went to work applying industry best practices to ensure the best performance possible. In fact along the way we even led the charge on some new emerging standards around third-party plugin performance.

That’s why Martin Hunt and I were recently invited by Steve Souders (Performance Lead at Google) to give a detailed talk on our approach to performance at the Velocity 2010 Web Performance and Operations Conference.

Plugin Performance

So what makes a plugin fast? The performance of a third-party plugin is directly related to how it handles these four concerns:

  • Payload size. The amount of code that needs to be downloaded & processed.
  • Network requests. The number of additional network requests required to load the plugin.
  • Page blocking. Whether the plugin blocks the page from rendering.
  • Plugin speed. How fast the plugin can render itself and be ready for activity.

We made version 10 of the Meebo Bar significantly faster by addressing each of the above concerns, implementing five specific performance improvements.

1. Just-in-time code delivery

One secret to making third-party plugins faster is to download the smallest amount of code needed at just the right time. A smaller initial payload means the bar can start up much faster. Deferred loading of functionality means the loading cost of each feature is paid incrementally instead of all at once. As a consequence, the initial JavaScript payload is now just 1/3 of its previous size. Smaller payload size and network requests made just when you need them leads to an overall faster bar.

2. True persistent caching

What if we could take the code that gets loaded for the Meebo Bar during an initial site visit and store all of that code locally? And on subsequent visits to sites with the bar remember the local copy instead of re-downloading it from the network? This is exactly the approach we have taken with our true caching mechanism. Simply put: near zero payload size and fewer network requests results in a faster bar.

3. Smarter image loading

The number of requests a plugin makes to load and render itself is an important factor in its overall performance. Some plugins have small download sizes but then require dozens of additional requests to fetch the necessary images to render themselves. Lots of network requests can really affect page rendering time.

In this version, all of our images (e.g., for buttons) are bundled within our CSS stylesheet as embedded data. Because image download piggybacks on an existing request, the total number of requests is kept low regardless of the number of images required. The end product is a faster overall page experience.

Martin wrote about embedded images back in March, and some of you asked what tools we use to accomplish this. Paul has been working to prepare an open source version of our CSS parser and pre-processor. Make sure to check back for more news about this later!

4. Non-blocking code

Normally when you add JavaScript code to a page the browser will block the rest of the page from rendering while it downloads and processes the recently downloaded JavaScript.

To solve this problem, Martin went to work and pioneered a technique that ensures the browser will never block while loading the Meebo Bar. This approach has garnered interest in the engineering community, leading us to share the mechanism with the rest of the industry. Not blocking the page from rendering is fundamental to performant third party plugins.

5. Faster, more flexible rendering

In previous versions of the bar we took the standard approach of using images to create gradients, drop shadows and rounded corners. Images are static, inflexible and relatively large in payload size.

In the new version of the bar we take a different approach. By rendering a large portion of our graphics using vector drawing technologies (like SVG and VML) we can draw the bar faster without additional HTTP requests and with greater flexibility to customize the look and feel of the bar.

The Result

Shortly we will be releasing version 10 of the Meebo Bar. It is a key step forward in terms of the quality it delivers to the user’s site experience. The good news is it delivers all of the previous Meebo Bar functionality with even greater security and with a significant boost in speed. While we can’t speed up the coffee line or change that traffic light, we can at least reduce the time you spend waiting when using a website on which we’re featured.

Marcus

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meebo and the seventeen.com makeover

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We’re really excited to announce our newest Meebo Bar partner: Seventeen.com!

Seventeen.com just launched a redesigned website, and the Meebo Bar is powering sharing and a bunch of other in-page features on their site. You can share your favorite articles and photos, interact directly on the site with all of your friends (or just a few!), and even check out Seventeen’s Facebook and Twitter feeds, from any page on the website.

We think that’s pretty cool.

Check it out if you have a chance! www.seventeen.com

-Steph

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connecting across the web

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The Windows Live Team just announced the availability of Messenger Connect, a set of feature rich APIs that allows developers such as Meebo to tap into many of the services that Windows Live offers its 500 million users across the web.

We see this trend toward “connect flows” across the industry, and since we’ve been working in this space since our inception, we definitely support this move as a Messenger Connect partner. It keeps data secure and gives users greater control over the sharing of their personal information.

Messenger Connect brings three strengths:
  • It’s standards based. ActivityStrea.ms, OAuth WRAP and Portable Contacts are all open standards that Messenger Connect supports and they’re asking for feedback on what other standards make sense in the APIs.
  • It’s secure. With delegated authentication (like OAuth) quickly becoming the norm, users have more control than ever over what services have access to their account. Delegated authentication means no more encrypted passwords and the ability to revoke third party services at any time.
  • It’s flexible. Messenger Connect provides multiple ways for developers to integrate, from RESTful APIs to JavaScript libraries to even copy-and-paste widgets. You’re not locked into using any single technology.

The social web is moving towards open standards, delegated authentication and increased user control and we’re really excited to see Messenger Connect promote these ideas and enable developers to create new seamless user experiences across the web.

Check it out: Developing with Messenger Connect: Recognizable & intuitive

-Jian

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come on england!

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Meebo is a company of many nationalities. In the office are folks hailing from England, France, Australia, Canada, Italy, Sweden, Argentina, Poland, India, and of course, most of the folks are from the United States. Whether you call it football or soccer, many of us have been looking forward to friendly rivalries between office friends during the World Cup this year.

In California the first games start really early in the morning, and only the most die-hard supporters creep out of bed to catch the 4:30 kick off. The second round of games starts at 7:00, and for the recent USA vs. Slovenia game I joined several folks from Meebo for a breakfast in the pub below our office and some U-S-A chants—and boy, what a game that was. The final round of games, at 11:30, makes for great lunch time viewing, and several of them have been projected onto the office wall.

Hailing from England, our first match against USA was particularly exciting. I experienced that joyful moment of the first goal in under 3 minutes, followed by disbelief at a goal-keeping slip up as the first half was drawing to a close. Neither team was able to come back with a score in the second half, so after 90 minutes and a 1-1 draw, the jubilation of the Americans—along with some friendly ribbing in the office on Monday—made it a fun match to be a part of.

So to all of the teams represented by Meebo employees, and all of the teams from your respective countries, good luck!

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meebo bar performance secrets (revealed at Velocity!)

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While building the Meebo Bar we have identified a number of problems that plague third party plugins on the web. We’ve experimented with various solutions that involve:

  • cross-browser JavaScript loading mechanisms that do not block rendering or loading of the parent page
  • replacing images with cross-browser vector graphics
  • generating browser-specific CSS with embedded images
  • caching JavaScript in client-side storage
  • loading private user data in a secure fashion on third-party sites

All of these techniques come together in the next version of the Meebo Bar, making it the best performing and most technically advanced version of the bar yet.

This Thursday, Martin and I will be giving a talk at the Velocity conference in Santa Clara, outlining and describing in depth all of the techniques that went into optimizing the Meebo Bar. If you are interested in embedding your JavaScript on other people pages, you don’t want to miss this :)

We hope to see you at Velocity in Santa Clara on Thursday!

5101 Great America Parkway
Santa Clara, CA 95054
06/24/2010, 2:30 PM in Ballroom A/B
http://en.oreilly.com/velocity2010/public/schedule/full#s2010-06-24-14:30

Marcus

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secret emoticons (repost)

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When Meebo first launched, we weren’t sure what kind of feedback to expect. Add/Remove buddy support, saved chatlogs, customized away messages perhaps? I would have never predicted that one of our most consistently requested features over the last few years would be more emoticons.

Some folks have figured out that we support more emoticons than are displayed in the IM dialog emoticon palette. We’ve been adding even more emoticons lately. One of our Meebo traditions is to commemorate someone’s two-year anniversary with Meebo by giving them free rein to design their own emoticon. Everyone on our team is very unique, and so are the resulting emoticons. Here’s a quick cheat sheet of the secret emoticons that are brought to you by the imagination and whimsy of the Meebo crew. See if you can figure out the stories behind these emoticons…

(grillz)
(mom)
(vw)
(monkeyking)
(letsgogiants)
(simon)
(pilot)
(prosopagnosiac)
(r2d2)
(sadpanda)
(chicago)
(mikey)
(moto)
(nutella)
(pnb)
(stanford)
(yoga)
(shaka)
(schroedinger)

Enjoy!
-Elaine

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what do YOU share?

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Take the Survey!!

We’re doing a lot of thinking about how our users are sharing the things they love with their friends and family. 

So we figured, what better way to find out how our users share than to hear it straight from the source?  It’s a short survey, I promise :)

So, check it out.  We love learning about our users.  Thanks!

Cheers,

Abel

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