We just celebrated our 2nd-year birthday with a little party up in San Francisco. The whole team has been working around the clock so it was nice to get some entertainment (Guitar Hero!) and finger food. It was really great to see so many of the folks who’ve helped us along the way as we’ve built meebo. Now, we promised we’d let you all in on our little birthday surprise, so here it is!

We’re super excited to debut applications inside meebo! Just click on that shiny new rocket ship icon in any IM window and then select which app you want to launch with your buddy. The first type of application we’re showcasing? Drumroll please… Voice and video chat.

So many of you have asked for this feature from day one and now you can video/audio call (TokBox), voice chat (Pudding Media), and group voice call (TalkShoe) on meebo, plus you can even create your own live TV show (UStream) to share with your friends!

Why stop there? There are so many cool applications you can dream up to connect people live! Play games? Go shopping? Watch TV? Find restaurants? They’re all coming soon and we know we can’t possibly code all the neat ideas out there, so we thought, why not open it up to all of you? We’re opening our doors and letting meebo applications be open for anyone to develop! Got an idea? Just visit http://www.meebo.com/platform and you can learn about the meebo platform API, obtain a unique key, and get access to a starter kit to help you build and test your application in meebo.com. JavaScript or Flash, it’s your choice.

When we were all thinking about how to describe our platform, we thought of a great phrase that represents the synchronous and live nature of meebo applications:

“I want to ______ with you.”

I have no idea what you all will come up with, but I bet it’ll be pretty creative! On November 27, we’re hosting another Lunch 2.0 at meebo, followed by an all-day and all-night dev camp for users, interested developers, and potential partners. If you’re far, far away from Mountain View, we’ll offer “virtual office hours” to connect remote developers with the meebo team via video and audio calls. Stay tuned for more details…

As always, we can’t wait to hear your feedback on all of this new stuff! We did our best to squash every bug that came up in the last few weeks, but if you find one (or two, or three), it would be so awesome if you emailed us at comments at meebo dot com or left us a message in the forum. We’ll definitely be working on getting things solid over the next few weeks to get ready for even more fun stuff showing up behind that cool rocket ship.

Can’t wait to hear what you think!

cheers,
sandy

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UPDATE:

Hey all – tonight meebo’s celebrating its second birthday party! Not only should it be a fun event, but we’ve got a pretty neat birthday surprise up our sleeves.

The venue’s pretty small, but we really wanted to include all of you. We were trying to get a live stream of the event set up, but it looks like we’re unfortunately not going to be able to get that working. Bummer! Check out the blog later tonight for a full recap of the event…and of course, we’ll let you all in on that little birthday surprise too!

Take care!
Seth

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During the course of the past several weeks, the meebo team has pulled crazy marathon coding sessions to create a fabulous Firefox add-on with visual notifications and sidebar buddylist. As someone on meebo’s design team, I felt it fitting to tell the add-on creation story my own way – enjoy! – Christian

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The first things to go in our kitchen are the bagels. I like to eat a light lunch and sometimes a toasted bagel with some lunch meat sounds pretty tasty. My cravings are rarely met because when the meebo team comes in in the morning, poof! the bagels are all eaten =p.

The meebo kitchen has become a pretty important place at the company: a gathering area, morning hang-out, nap room, and code review central. Since the company has become quite a bit larger than when we first moved in, the dynamics of where people relax has changed as well. Instead of one futon, we’ve got three. Instead of a few mugs, there are now many more hanging from the hooks on the wall. (Not to mention the morning race for those bagels!)

We’ve had to re-arrange desks a bit, shuffle people into places where they’ll be most productive, and at the same time consider things like increased chatter, background noise, and general activity around a very open office. I wrote an entry a while back when we were moving from Palo Alto, and the office has evolved a lot.

I guess part of “growing up” in a company’s life cycle is adapting the environment. Our office is a really fun place, but also a really productive place. Part of that is maintaining the balance between work and goofing off. The kitchen, for example, remains a really important factor in that balance; we can all buckle down and concentrate on the latest and greatest code review… while snacking on a handful of grapes, lounging on the couch, and kicking off our shoes.

cheers,
sandy

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A friend of mine who’s a senior executive at a very large entertainment company told me that because his company sells through retailers, cable, and other channels, they don’t directly talk to or hear from their customers, and it’s a problem they’re actively trying to change.

It’s really different here at meebo, and that’s one of the reasons I joined. We are very fortunate to enjoy that dialog with you, through the blog, forums, feedback, and surveys like the one we put out last week.

The number of responses we received was overwhelming and we’d like to share some of the results…

11,194 people completed the survey and of those people, roughly half were female, half were male.

67% of the people who took the survey were from the US. We received some suggestions to do international questions. We will. We also had respondents from Afghanistan, Angola, Brazil, Canada, all throughout Europe, India, China, and a few from Zimbabwe.

74% of people said they found out about meebo from a friend or co-worker.

79% said you use IM every day, 80% IM for an hour or more a day. 21% said they IM for 10 hours or more. Wow!

We asked what else you do while on meebo.

78% said email, although 63% said they IM more than email. Other popular activities done while meeboing include: playing games 32%, sharing/listening to music, 50%, surfing the web 62%, doing work 70%, and 23% said they watch TV and use meebo at the same time.

79% said they prefer IM to text messaging (whew!)

In terms of advertising categories, we’ve received very positive feedback on our bubble ad that is on the left of the screen. Respondents said they’d like to continue to see music there, and also see ads for movies, tech toys, and some other stuff. Very few said they’d like to see political advertising. Got it!

We had 6,663 comments on features you’d like to see on meebo – which is awesome. We’re going through those each week and I’d imagine that you’ll see them show up in our product development.

Thanks to all who responded. Knowing more helps us build better products, fix bugs, and it’s great to come to work feeling like I know a little bit more about the people who use the products we build.

Martin

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Over the last two days I got to talk with students at both my high school and my college. In both cases, the students were all interested in potentially starting their own business some day, and my goodness did they have a lot of questions. One of my favorite topics that usually comes up is how to put together an initial team to actually work on the project!

Those of you who’ve used meebo for a long while know that Elaine, Sandy and I got together and worked on completely different ideas before ultimately coming up with the idea of moving IM over to the web. We actually started back in 2003, but didn’t launch anything until 2005. What this means, though, is that we decided that we liked working together and that we were a really strong team, so even if we started in on one project and decided we didn’t like it, we stayed together and worked on the next one.

I tried to start a bunch of startups before meebo…and they all, more or less, failed. A common factor, I think, was that I tried to do them myself…I didn’t find other really great people to team up with. The reality, of course, is that any given person is only knowledgeable in a relatively narrow field. Sure, I can raise a round of funding, but I could never actually build meebo. That has Elaine and Sandy written all over it! And then if you look at Elaine’s and Sandy’s unique skills, you notice that they too are very complementary to each other. Elaine’s focus is what you see on the screen (front end) while Sandy’s is moving bits through servers really efficiently (back end).

The team that you work with to do a startup is incredibly important. You really want to find people who are NOT like you…who have unique skills that complement your weaknesses (me: attention to detail…not so good!). So make sure you branch out and find folks who complement you, and perhaps above all, make sure you all really love working together…you’ll be spending many sleepless nights working together!

Seth

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A few weeks ago, Andreas came through meebo’s doors a little winded and just barely in time for lunch. After making sure he was okay, he told us about his morning adventures biking all the way from Santa Cruz to Mountain View. After taking a few wrong turns and going off course by twenty miles or so, he ran across a wild boar! I’m not a huge fan of Gu energy gels, but Andreas swears that after 40 miles on a bike lost in the Santa Cruz mountains, even the Gu starts to taste pretty good.

While Andreas and Christian head up from the South, a few members of our crew make the trek to Mountain View from the north. Danny takes the San Francisco train and is usually the first to send out a warning email if the trains are delayed. Martin makes the morning jaunt over the Golden Gate bridge in his Prius with his real-time mile per gallon graphs. As a stats junkie, I keep meaning to ask him for a dashboard demo.

Seth just finished his IFR training which means he can officially fly through clouds. He’s making his first cross-country flight this weekend to attend East Coast college recruiting events. He told me on Friday that he woke up that morning a little bit anxious to tackle the 14-hour flight. Snowy weather over the Sierra-Nevadas delayed his adventure until Saturday. Besides having more opportunities for events and meetings, he and his long-time friend/co-pilot are looking forward to the opportunity to see the fall colors from the sky.

Between bikes, trains, and priuses, the meebo team’s transportation methods really vary. My morning trek is more traditional – typically just a 15 minute drive to Castro Street from 280 to 85. However, I’m tuned in to the train commuting schedule, to the shuffle of carpooling folks walking in after stopping by Red Rock for a cup of coffee, and I welcome the sight of the bikes lined up against meebo’s walls in the morning.

Take Care!
-Elaine

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Take the Survey!

It’s been a little while since our last user survey and since we’ve been growing in usage (thanks everyone!) we’d like to find out a little bit more about you all – please take 5 minutes to share your thoughts with us. Some of the questions are designed to help us improve meebo and some of them are meant to be more fun (do you like Coke or Pepsi more?)…

Last time the responses were awesome, and so fast! Within 24 hours we had a lot of data, and we’re hoping to break that record this time. We love user feedback and what better way than to ask you directly.

So, check it out and let us know what you’re thinking. Thanks!

cheers,
sandy

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People often ask me what meebo’s biggest challenge is. The funny thing is, the answer’s really easy: hiring! It’s incredibly difficult for us to find incredible people to join meebo’s team (on that note, check out our available positions here!). So why does it matter that it’s really tough to find great people to join meebo? Because our biggest bottleneck to bringing you all the features that you’ve been requesting through the blog and the forums is not having enough folks on the meebo team!

At the end of the day, we always feel “resource constrained.” There are so many features that we want to build for you all, but there’s just a limit to how quickly we can build them while maintaining a really high quality bar.

So imagine the discussion when we decided that we’re going to spend a couple weeks working on “features” that none of you see (and none of you are actively requesting). Yep, that’s right…. release number 32 went out this evening, but you’re unlikely to notice any major changes. So what happened, and why’d we do that??

The most visible feature released (and it’s not THAT visible) is your offline buddies, in the tooltip, will now show what group they’re a member of. Everything else, however, was “under the hood.” The buddylist should load faster due to more efficient handling of incoming events in the JavaScript. We’re testing some new scaling techniques in the way the web browser talks to the servers. We changed the way we update the graphics associated with the sponsored features. We fixed a bunch of little bugs that had been accumulating on our personal “must fix” lists. In sum, it’s a release that you can equate to an oil change in your car… no visible features, but it’s critical stuff to keep meebo humming along for everyone.

We try to do these kinds of releases every so often to keep our figurative engine clean, it’s nice to tidy up the shop!

Seth

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