Quick Update: – we’re listening to your feedback to the new release – thanks for taking the time to leave your thoughts.

We’re planning the next release and based upon your messages, it looks like the preset away messages definitely need to come back! No worries, they’re not lost. Look for their return very shortly. We want to make meebo the best it can be and couldn’t do it without you.

You might have noticed a few changes in Meebo today – some updates to the console, a new media bar treatment, and a new feature in the IM window that around the office we’ve been calling “conversation starters.”

Our conversation starters (the little drop-down link to the right of the smiley menu in your IM window) are unabashedly silly. We don’t expect that you need to know the top speed of an ostrich or to know that a giraffe can clean its ears with its tongue. However, it’s amazing how these little factoids can be springboards for some fun conversations. Here’s one entertaining dialog that I had with a good friend yesterday:

[21:08] elaine: Ostriches can run up to 70 km/h (43 mph).
[21:09] agentT: that’s pretty fast
[21:09] agentT: i could catch one though
[21:09] agentT: if it was hot enough out
[21:09] elaine: how does the heat correspond to anything?
[21:09] agentT: they found that humans are the only good endurance runners
[21:09] elaine: really?
[21:09] agentT: and when it’s hot enough out, humans can chase basically any animal to exhaustion
[21:10] elaine: no way
[21:10] agentT: and then when they overheat, the animals can’t do anything
[21:10] agentT: so the humans can eat them
[21:10] elaine: i did not know that
[21:11] elaine: wow
[21:11] elaine: that conversation starter really worked
[21:11] agentT: oh was that a conversation starter?
[21:11] elaine: yeah
[21:11] agentT: hmmm
[21:11] agentT: what are the other ones?

Most likely, agentT probably read Bramble and Lieberman’s research a while ago. I am pretty certain that scientific research on human endurance wouldn’t have surfaced if I had just opened with a routine “yt?” or “hi there” message. We’ve also tied in one or two advertising factoids as well. I just sent my crewcut guy friend a note about shampoo to see how he’d react. One final story: this morning I received a private message from someone I didn’t know, “hi” after visiting a room. I responded with, “The average person falls asleep in seven minutes…” I think the lurker is still scratching his or her head. In any case, I haven’t heard from them again.

We’ve also been looking through the responses from Mike’s blog survey a week ago to see how people stay in touch through Meebo. With your feedback, we’ve made the presence and status message features more prominent. Now you can set a status message to broadcast what’s happening around you to your close friends. And, often times, those little micro-messages are enough to instigate a conversation too. We also made it easy to send a shout-out to Meebo in your status message. But if you don’t want to, that’s okay too. We’re just glad you’re here.

Enjoy, and let us know what you think. If you have any fun conversations emerge from the conversation starters – we’d love to hear about them! And with that, I leave you to guess which one of these four sentences is not true. We can discuss in the blog comments

A. Every continent has a city called Rome
B. African elephants only have four teeth available to chew their food
C. Men are struck by lightning four times more often than women
D. Iceland produces more bananas than any other European country

Take care!
-Elaine

[ comments ] [ past blogs ]

It’s been a while since we added support for a new IM network. In fact, aside from our first Community IM network Flixster a month or two ago, the last networks we added were Jabber and Google Talk on September 19th, 2005.

Over the course of the day, we’re rolling out support for not one, but TWO new networks: MySpace and Facebook.  These are two of the biggest social networks in the world, and we’re sure many of you use them on a daily basis.  So click that “sign on to more accounts” link and let us know what you think! We’re always hard at work trying to create the best user experience possible, so please let us know about any problems you have or suggestions for improvements.

Many people outside of Meebo helped make this happen. First off, thanks to the folks at MySpace who encouraged us and helped us to test and gave us their support. A particular shout out to Ali, Dawn and Tom.

And as always, we’re pretty heavy users of open source software here at Meebo, and these changes are no different. We’d also like to thank Eion Robb, who created the Pidgin Facebook Chat plugin.  Casey Ho, who helped polish the Facebook Chat plugin. And everyone else who has helped out with Pidgin and libpurple over the years! We’ve already contributed many changes back to these projects, and hope to continue doing so. Let us know what you all think, and of course, send in any bugs you may find!

[ comments ] [ past blogs ]

Wallpaper is supposed to be making a comeback. But the wallpaper in my bathroom has been up since the last time wallpaper was cool, so I don’t think it qualifies. Think Where the Wild Things Are meets The Jungle Book (1967 animated film version). Spooky.

What does that have to do with Meebo? Not much. But our latest release is bringing wallpapers back to the Meebo console, and fortunately none of these backgrounds will make you wish you had a brighter night light.

First, a note about the IM History notification message: we aren’t including that in this release, and we are very appreciative of all the user feedback we received. Thanks to everyone who wrote in!

Now a quick summary of Meebo wallpapers for you:

• Back in June we updated the look and feel of Meebo, and our old wallpaper picker, which was getting bloated and impossible to navigate, had to go.
• So we got some designs together and asked you to throw in your two cents. You obliged. Like, a lot.
• Take a bunch of input from users, throw in lots of people’s thoughts, prototypes, designs, and implementations, add just a little sprinkle of fairy dust, and out comes the Appearance Panel!

It’s a new link at the top of your Meebo console, and we think you should give it a try. [A QUICK UI NOTE - to clear your wallpaper, click on the "preferences" link at the top of the Meebo console and find the "Appearance" section. We'll definitely be adding that to the Appearance Panel soon...]

And it’s not just the picker that’s better! We now have re-sizable wallpapers on Firefox 3, Safari 3, and Opera 9! Don’t like tiling wallpapers? Get on a standards-supporting browser, and enjoy your very own auto-scaling background.

But hold on to your socks, there’s more to come! Keep on the lookout for our next blog post, which will further elucidate the joys of gussying up your Meebo console… (Why do I feel like Ron Popeil right now?)

We’d love to hear your feedback about the new Appearance Panel, and don’t forget to mix and match chrome colors with wallpapers until you find that perfect combination that says “I have watched way too many hours of “Design Star.”

Happy wallpaper picking!

Greg

[ comments ] [ past blogs ]

Imagine getting the chance to work first-hand on your favorite web application and implement that one feature that you’ve longed to see and use. Then picture joining your dream team: a solid group of rock-star A-league players, who are all warmly welcoming, totally supportive and absolutely brilliant at what they do. That’s what the past three weeks have been like for me.

I’ve always considered Meebo to be one of those rare instances of an elegant solution that addresses a real-world need with well-defined problems and complex challenges. In this case, the need is instantaneous communication on the web, universally accessible from anywhere and at any time. The challenges are significant, both in terms of front end user interfaces and back end server architecture. The solution… Meebo. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to join the battle.

Clearly, no solution is perfect, and everyone around me is working continuously to improve and evolve Meebo. I am sure you’ve already heard about our most recent project announcement: Meebo Community IM. It’s got the press buzzing, and lots of online communities are already on board. It is impressive to see the degree to which user feedback is integrated into our day to day proceedings, and with less than three weeks under my belt I can already say with certainty that your involvement is crucial to Meebo’s continued successful development. And so it is with great anticipation that I get to ask for your feedback on my contribution to our most recent release: the Buddy List filter.

Since I started IM’ing, I’ve collected more or less my entire social network in various IM networks. Now, thanks to Meebo, I have access to all my MSN, ICQ, AIM and Google Talk friends in a single buddy list. However, having such a large buddy list sometimes makes it difficult to quickly find the friends I am looking for. That’s what the buddy list filter is for. To use it, just click on the text box right at the top of your list and start typing a buddy’s name.

Then you can choose to go ahead and double click on your buddy to start a chat like you usually do, or for expediency just hit the down arrow on your keyboard to navigate to your buddy and then hit enter. For all you power users who can do anything and everything using only your keyboard – there are a few goodies in the filter for you. After clicking on the buddy list, try some of the following:

• Hit the slash key “/” to automatically put your cursor in the buddy filter – ready to type & filter!
• Hit the down key to navigate your buddies. Hold Shift while you’re at it to select more than one, and then hit Enter to open up a separate chat with each one of them.
• To clear the filter and get your full buddy list back, just hit the Escape key at any time you have focus on the buddy list.

There are a few more extras in there, but those are for you to discover on your own! If you’re a fan of Regular Expressions, do make sure to give them a try in the buddy filter!

We have made many other little improvements and fixes as well. As always, we are looking forward to getting your feedback and hearing your opinion.

See you on Meebo!

[ comments ] [ past blogs ]

We’ve been releasing a new version of Meebo every two or three weeks for a long time now. There are usually a few noticeable changes in every release. The frontend team works hard making windows 2 pixels larger, or making sure we use the same font everywhere. What you don’t see is that behind the scenes there are a handful of us on the backend team scurrying around making sure things will scale to millions of logins per day and hundreds of logins per second.

We’re still using lighttpd and mod_meebo. And up until a few weeks ago we were still using the Gaim 1.5.0 codebase to connect to the various IM networks. But Gaim’s successor, Pidgin, has been out for over a year (and under development for almost four years!) and we thought it was time we upgraded.

There are a lot of reasons we wanted to upgrade. One reason is that it’s a good opportunity to cleanup our source code. It’s a bit like “spring cleaning”—making the code easier to understand, easier to work with, getting rid of old code that is no longer needed, etc. It’s also good to stay current with the open source project, so that we can easily take advantage of any changes made to Pidgin. That includes bug fixes, new features, and the occasional security patch (making sure other people can’t crash your Meebo session, for example).

We’re actually using only one part of Pidgin—something called libpurple. It’s a programming library that does the dirty work of connecting to AIM and MSN and Yahoo. It knows how to talk to each IM network to login, grab your buddylist and send and receive messages. We’re pretty fond of libpurple—it’s small, efficient, stable, and gets the job done. Of course I’m a little biased… I’ve been contributing to libpurple and Pidgin for years. Our thanks to all the many great volunteers who have helped create libpurple over the past 10 years.

We’ve been gradually switching to the new version and hopefully you haven’t noticed too many problems, though a few people have already written in with some bug reports. For example, sending a message using a small font in Yahoo causes the message to show up in a HUGE font for the other person. Sometimes Meebo users in your buddy list show up as “Not Authorized.” And sometimes your Meebo account is listed as “username@meebo.org” instead of just “username.” We are feverishly working on these, and hope to have them fixed within the next couple of weeks. If you notice any other problems please let us know at comments@meebo.com!

But don’t worry—we didn’t just break things! We also fixed a few bugs and made some improvements:

• Our new code has fewer bugs and so it crashes about 90% less, which means you’ll see fewer network interruptions. We know how annoying it is to be disconnected, so this is always a top priority for us.
• If one of your IM accounts is disconnected it will reconnect automatically.
• AIM away messages show up much faster after you login.
• People whose Meebo account name contains profanity are now able to join Meebo Rooms (using a randomly generated nickname, of course; we still don’t allow profanity in your nickname in Meebo Rooms—sorry, but Meebo is a family place).
• Users can now send offline messages for AIM.
• Joining popular Meebo Rooms should be a little faster.

But we’re not done yet! We’re hoping to bring you some great new features in the future. And remember, we’re always working to make Meebo the best thing ever. So good in fact that Snapple will be forced to make their beverages out of us!

[ comments ] [ past blogs ]

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

[ comments ] [ past blogs ]

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

[ comments ] [ past blogs ]

Update:The Grammys are here! Take advantage of one of the few red-carpet-worthy moments this awards season and join the Pagesix.com meebo room on Sunday, February 10 at 7pm EST to dish about all the fashion hits and misses, as well as the winners and losers!

You can join in the chat either by visiting Page Six or by visiting the Page Six room on meebo. Word has it that PageSix.com’s Grammys expert Matt Donnelly will be on hand to supply the snark!

—

meebo’s growing! Our little team now occupies both sides of our office and I’d love to take this opportunity to welcome Chris, Priscilla, and Cyndie to the team. Yesterday the office was even more fun because Chris brought in his little puppy Sofie, Vijay brought in Sasha, and Mark even brought in Toro. What do you get when you mix a Maltese Poodle, a Lab/Doberman mix, and a little Chihuahua? =p

We pushed a small release today that should hopefully fix a few bugs, as always feedback is appreciated.

cheers!
sandy

[ comments ] [ past blogs ]

More good news! meebo has been named one of AlwaysOn’s OnMedia Top 100 Companies for 2007. As one of the Community Platforms, meebo joins other winners like hi5 and imeem. The team is really honored to have been nominated and to be included as a winner is pretty awesome.

AlwaysOn is having an event in New York City called OnMedia NYC in a couple days and we’ve been invited as one of the winners! Seth is planning on attending so he’ll be back to his old haunt this week.

And just a heads up we pushed a bug fix release last week so again, let us know if you spot anything awry!

cheers,
sandy

[ comments ] [ past blogs ]

As each new employee joins meebo one of the first things they do is sign up for an IM account and everyone adds them to their buddylists. This year the meebo family is larger than ever and we’re never short of an online buddy to talk to. No matter what time of the day, there’s a good chance you’ll find someone is busy making meebo better. This christmas I went back to the UK to visit my family and even though there was an 8 hour difference between me and the meebo office I’d still occasionally find Elaine or Jian up in the wee hours before crashing for the night and I could catch up on the previous day’s events as I started my day.

However, for each new buddy we add to our buddylists we noticed it was taking slightly longer for people to be able to log into meebo and so before christmas we decided to have a look at the buddylist and see if we could make it faster. We don’t want to wait too long when signing in to catch up with our friends! Over christmas and new years, in between eating freshly baked mince pies with plenty of brandy butter, we spent some time optimising the buddylist, squeezing out as much performance as we could, milliseconds at a time. On Friday we put the finishing touches on our first release of 2008.

The latest changes should make your buddylist fly and logging in can take less than half the time it used to. We calculated that if you add up the time saved for all of our users on a daily basis, it amounts to 6 days of time every single day! It also means that as the meebo family continues to grow this year we’ll be able to keep up with everyone on the team using meebo no matter where in the world we are.

There’s a lot more to look forward to in 2008, happy new year to all!
Paul

[ comments ] [ past blogs ]