A typical day in my world consists of precisely arranging tiny pixels into graphics and thinking about how UI elements may influence any given design.

As a designer I find that working in a creative field is extremely rewarding but there are times when it’s nice to channel all my creative energy into something completely unrelated to designing graphics for web applications. Recently I used a hack day as an opportunity to do just that.

Meeplinko is the outcome of a hack day project that became a multi-weekend & evening obsession. The idea was to build an actual real-life Plinko game, similar to the one used on the “Price is Right” game show, and add some meebo branding. I thought it would a be a fun office toy for people to play with.

The game is played by inserting a shiny orange ring at the top and watching it bounce in-between the 60 pins as it chooses a random path to the bottom. There are seven possible slots the ring can fall in. We’ve joked around with the idea of this being a decision-maker for what to have for lunch, or better, who’s going to take me to lunch .

The project stands at 7ft. tall and was fabricated from wood, masonite, plexiglass, and a bazillion screws & bolts. It still needs some finishing work like labeling the prize slots and adding some paint decoration but in its current raw-material state it looks (and sounds) pretty cool. If you’re in the area visiting meebo, I invite you to “Come on down!” and give it a try.

-Later
Christian

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Many of you who’ve been using meebo for awhile will remember when we raised our first couple rounds of investment. The first was just a bit over two years ago, and I talked about how we went about that process here, here, and here. Then, a year or so later, we raised our second round of capital and talked about it over here.

I’m very happy to announce that meebo just completed its third round of financing, and added some absolutely fantastic investors, JAFCO, Time Warner and KTB to a list of folks who have already been super helpful to us in building meebo.

One question I get a lot is “how do you decide who to work with when you’re raising a venture round?” The subtext is that people are wondering whether raising a round of investment is “just money” or whether there’s additional value beyond the capital that helps fuel the growth of the company.

This is all of our first time going through building a startup like meebo, and we’re certainly learning as we go along. As in previous rounds, we didn’t know many investors who invested in “late stage” companies. The first part of the process, therefore, was heading out and meeting as many folks as possible. Did our personalities click? Did we have the same vision for where meebo should go as a company? Did we share similar philosophies on how to build a company? These were the initial questions we were asking ourselves.

Through the process, we realized we could add an additional lense. That is, was there quantitative value that we could point to and say “they will help us grow meebo.” With the three investors we’ve brought aboard, the answer is clearly “yes!”

JAFCO is a very large venture fund in Japan. In the United States, Joe Horowitz and team lead JAFCO’s US fund. Not only will we get great advice from Joe, but JAFCO actually has a business development team on the ground in Japan that’s very excited to bring meebo to Japan. Nice!

We have already partnered with Time Warner. We partnered with AOL IM a little while ago to bring official access to the AOL IM network. Time Warner also owns brands you may recognize like TMZ, CNN, New Line Cinemas and People Magazine. All of these would be fantastic partners for meebo, and we look forward to exploring how we can work with them all.

Finally, KTB is a Korean venture fund with investments spread across the United States, Korea and China. They’ll be able to help us out with introductions to some of these portfolio companies for partnering opportunities, again as a way to spread meebo into these markets.

Thanks to all of you who’ve helped us build meebo. From folks who’ve helped translate meebo into another language to our forum moderators and those of you who give us feedback on the product so that we can constantly improve it. Without all of you, meebo would not be what it is today.

Seth

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A few weeks ago we started seeing a few changes around meebo… Andrea started receiving more phone calls, we saw a sudden increase in the daily number of meebo account registrations, and people outside meebo were talking about the meebo repeater a lot more than usual.

Turns out these were all side effects of the new meebo product site redesign. We started this project because it seemed like “the right thing to do.” The pages were a little outdated, the experience felt inconsistent with meebo’s core, and first-time visitors didn’t have a place to learn more about meebo. We never would have guessed that a better explanation of meebo would substantially increase account registrations, that people interested in joining meebo would get more excited after reading these pages, or that we’d get more visitors dropping by because our address was easier to find (Michael, nice to meet you and your friend last week!).

It’s worth mentioning that we’ve been using the Django framework to build the site and that’s allowed us to move much faster than if we had hand-coded each page individually. We highly recommend it - two thumbs up!

We’re about halfway through the project right now. We have a few new updates we’re pushing in the upcoming weeks followed by another initiative to hopefully tackle the job and help sections. Of course, right now it’s difficult to predict what tangible benefits those efforts might yield. Will we see more intern applications? Will more or fewer people write to us with questions? All fun things to anticipate and try to predict

Take Care!
-Elaine

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It’s been a while since we’ve gone over a technical topic and I thought it’d be fun to give people a high level view of how meebo works. Lots of people have asked how the whole magical AJAX thing works.

Step 1: When you type in “http://www.meebo.com” your browser finds the nearest DNS (domain name service) server and maps the name (e.g. “meebo.com”) to an IP address (e.g. 1.2.3.4). You can think of “meebo.com” as “Sandy’s Place” and the IP address as a destination like “215 Castro Street, Mountain View, CA”.

Step 2: Your browser requests meebo’s default HTML file and that file tells your browser how to display the page. HTML is a simple language that tells the browser how to paint a page and JavaScript is a language that browsers understand and can execute inside the webpage.

Step 3: The HTML file that you load from meebo’s servers instructs the browser to download the JavaScript from meebo’s servers and voila, you have everything you need to start a meebo session.

Step 4: When you hit the “Sign On” button, the whole page changes and all of a sudden you see a buddylist, draggable windows, and neat background skins.

What happened there?!?

It’s important to know that when you switch from the login screen to the buddylist screen, and back to the logout screen, it’s still the *same* webpage. With the instructions in meebo’s HTML and JavaScript code (that you downloaded in step 3), your browser knows how to repaint the page so that you can do things like drag IM windows around and bring up new dialogs. Lots of people might think that’s “AJAX” but it really isn’t — it’s mostly JavaScript and DHTML at work.

Back at meebo’s servers, your browser has sent us a message to initiate a server process that lives for the duration of your meebo session. That process takes care of things like connecting to your MSN or AOL account, sending messages to your buddies, and setting updates like your away status. How does that data get passed to your browser? That’s where the magic of AJAX happens…

So what is AJAX?

You know how when you’re waiting for a package from UPS and you go to the tracking website to figure out where it is? Some of you might hit the refresh button on your browser every 5 minutes (or 30 seconds if you’re really impatient) to get the newest update. It’s kind of a pain right? AJAX is a way to solve that very problem.

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is just a fancy way of passing data back and forth between your browser and web servers (in meebo’s case, running your server process) without having to refresh the page. So when you receive IMs, buddy list updates, and room conversations, all of that data is being transferred back and forth using an object called an XMLHttpRequest. Neat huh? This way, you can happily stay on the same webpage for hours and hours and enjoy a long and chatty meebo session without having to navigate to new pages or refresh the page for updates.

The browser has really come a long way hasn’t it?

I’ll give another post on how meebo me and meebo rooms works in a little bit, but in the meantime, enjoy!

cheers,
sandy

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Spring has finally warmed up Mountain View’s Castro street. Last Friday the sun was irresistible and we decided to trade our mice and cell phones for frisbees and blankets. We headed down the street to Cuesta Park to enjoy a day of barbecue, soccer, frisbee, and kickball. Andrea, Sue, Corey, and Sandy manned the barbecue pit. Andreas, David, Greg, Martin, and Natalie played a few rounds of soccer. Christian tossed the frisbee to PJ, his seven-year-old German Shephard. And everyone joined in later for an afternoon game of kickball.

Here are a few pics from the event:

Since meebo began, we’ve had 42 major releases (the last one happened last Tuesday). We’re a small crew and every 10-14 days, we plan a new round of updates. Someone from the engineering team volunteers to be our release manager. The release manager gathers test cases, keeps bugzilla up-to-date, works with Sue and Corey (who handle user support) to prioritize bug fixes, checks throughout the week to make sure everything’s on schedule, and then pushes the release to all of the servers. We’ve all taken turns being release manager and for release 42, Priscilla led the release effort for her first time.

We’ll be adding a new team member, a full-time Release Manager, soon. The role isn’t listed on our jobs page just yet. However, we always prefer to hire from the meebo community and from the folks who read our blog. If bug triage, release scripts, and maintaining a high-quality product appeals to you, we’d love to hear from you. Please send Anita your resume and cover letter.

A few of you have already noticed last Tuesday’s new updates - the background link and console updates were the easiest to spot. However, there were a few other updates that happened too…

Console Refresh - We’ve cleaned up the background so the accounts, preferences, and meebo me links are at the top and your account information is better grouped together.

Favorite Apps - Andreas and David added the ability to add a meebo console shortcut to your favorite applications.

Language Drop-down Menu - Our community has translated meebo into 81 languages from Afrikaans to Zulu. We simplified the frontpage design to display the languages in a drop-down menu.

Product Pages - We pushed a new set of product pages this week. Christian has been polishing them this week and we’re hoping to slowly tackle the other pages (like team and help pages) in the near future too.

IM Window Tab Navigation - Vijay added the ability to switch between IM dialogs by pressing the tab key inside an IM dialog message area. Now you can manage all of your conversations without the need for a mouse.

Various Bug Fixes - As always, we’ve squashed a few bugs that have sprouted out and the server team added optimizations to our database behind-the-scenes.

Enjoy!
-Elaine

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Most people equate Meebo with Web-based instant messaging. Whether at home, work, school, or in a lone rural internet cafe, Meebo provides quick access to your AIM, Yahoo and MSN accounts. But did you know that Meebo also has rooms that you can embed on any Web page, a Firefox extension with visual message notifications, and an iPhone version that you can access on the go?

For a while we’ve hosted some products pages on our blog but we haven’t been very disciplined at keeping them up-to-date with all of the different ways you can use Meebo. The Server and Ops teams recently finished a major reworking of our server architecture which now lets us host all of our Web site under one address: www.meebo.com (no more www28, wwwe or wwwl!). The new layout makes it easy for us to create Web pages on our main Web site.

During a Meebo hack day a couple of months ago, I had an idea for a new about page which would show everything that Meebo lets you do. Since those initial hack day mockups, the project has completely evolved. In February Tim and Tiffany joined us from MIT and carved out all of the content that we have on the blog. More recently Greg joined us and using his experience from editing musical journals, he’s taken on the voice of Meebo. Finally, with Christian’s fantastic eye and attention to detail, the new pages are looking amazing.

We’re adding the finishing touches but you can see a sneak preview today of our products—Meebo IM, Meebo Rooms (not quite ready), Meebo Me, Meebo for iPhone, Meebo Firefox Extension and the Meebo Repeater. We’re still working on the rest of the pages as well as many other exciting things!

Cheers,
Paul

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We’re super thankful to everyone in the world that uses our service and often wonder aloud about the lives of the little yellow lights in foreign places on the meebo map.

There are touching stories like military servicemen in the Middle East using meebo to keep in touch with friends and family, and it was great to hear from an aid worker who works in the Congo, hours away from non-generator supplied electricity using meebo too! We love hearing the stories of how you use meebo, and hope you keep sending them in.

In the spirit of those blinking lights all around the world, I’d like to ask for your help again in adding more lights… It’s been a while since we’ve highlighted the fact that meebo is available in many, many languages. I remember when we first blogged about adding Spanish to meebo and in 3 days we had 15 languages fully translated. Nowadays, thanks to all of our users, meebo is offered in 60+ languages.

For those of you who are new to meebo, if you’d like to help translate, we’ve put all the phrases you find in meebo onto a wiki. There are blank slots to the right of the English phrase where you can add your translation of the text. We add new phrases every once in a while, and I’ve just thrown in a fresh batch this week. If you’ve got some time, help us out (it’s fun too) =p.

cheers,
sandy

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A few of us boarded an American Airlines plane last weekend to join South by Southwest festival go-ers in Austin, Texas. SXSW focuses on creativity in music, interaction, and film. It also happens to be thirty miles away from one of my favorite eating spots, Salt Lick BBQ.

In one of last Sunday’s SXSW talks, Eric Nakagawa, founder of icanhascheezburger, shared his start-up story and recounted that the original inspiration for his site started with receiving a funny link to an image… on meebo!

The conversation went something like this:

Tuesday, January 9, 2007 02:49:24

[02:54] Proto Tofuburger: my new favorite
[02:54] Proto Cheezburger: haha
[02:54] Proto Cheezburger: fatty
[03:02] Proto Cheezburger: http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/010807/i-has-a-report.gif
[03:03] Proto Tofuburger: ha!

A few minutes later, Eric registered icanhascheezburger.com through godaddy and today over one million visitors enjoy his daily dose of lolspeak humor.

Eric tracked down the original meebo chatlog lines for me on Sunday night and a few of us at meebo couldn’t help but add a secret emoticon. Now if you type (cheezburger) (don’t forget the parentheses) then press enter, you’ll see the official icanhascheezburger image pop up in your conversation.

If you haven’t heard of lolspeak, check out icanhascheezburger or try meebo’s lolcat translation provided by pacdude and tesseracter.

Enjoy!
-Elaine

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We’re thrilled to have a newcomer join the meebo crew. Priscilla joined the team in early February and dived headfirst into our JavaScript and ActionScript. Her first contributions went live over the weekend and after doing a happy jig, we wanted to make sure we gave a shout out to her new features.

Moderator star - If you’ve spotted a star beside someone’s name in a room, now you’ll know why. A moderator star signifies room creators who can change the room’s photo, description, and keep conversations on track.

Widget emoticon palette - Jian added emoticons (smileys) to the meebo rooms widget a while ago but they’ve always been a little hard to access. Priscilla created a new emoticon palette to make it easier to add color to your conversation. Click on the friendly smiley on the right side of the messaging area to see our emoticons. You might find some emoticons you didn’t know about.

One-to-one message improvements - There’s a lot of one-to-one messaging happening in meebo rooms. Priscilla optimized the one-to-one messaging process to avoid message collisions for those of you that message a bunch and we’re giving you more immediate privacy controls to make it easier to block messages.

Other fixes - Finally, Priscilla and Jian also spent time cleaning up some smaller bugs and scrubbing the codebase to make it easier to add features in the future.

Welcome Priscilla!
- Elaine

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