I'm a fan of IM aggregator Meebo, even if its recently released Firefox plug-in left me a bit cold--actually, that last part is something of an understatement. After using the thing on my PC here at work for a couple of hours, I found myself frantically uninstalling every trace of the thing. Still, after speaking with the company's CEO/co-founder Seth Sternberg, it was clear that the app was just one part of the company's next big push.
Announced late last night--or, rather, early this morning--the next step is potentially much, much bigger. Meebo is rolling out a developer platform, and judging from the multiple e-mails that were waiting in my inbox this morning with the company's name in the subject line, a handful of third-party developers have already jumped onto the Meebo bandwagon. However, this isn't quite the $15 billion gravy train that is Facebook, so the first few names to jump on the Meebo developer bandwagon aren't quite Digg or Microsoft.
I'm not too familiar with Pudding Media, TalkShoe, TokBox, or Ustream.TV, but the four media companies have used the new platform to design voice chat, group voice calling, video and audio calling, and live broadcast apps for Meebo.
Meebo also said that it will be announcing (yeah, it's a bit anticlimactic) some more third-party apps in the near future, ranging from multiplayer games to office and productivity apps.
I'm apprehensive about the ever-increasing feature set, as I was when the company first launched its chat applications. I'm something of a passive IM user. My Meebo lives in one of my Firefox tabs while I work. That's a large part of the reason I wasn't too psyched about the recently introduced plug-in, which brought the activities of everyone on my buddy list into the forefront.
The kids, however, are a different story--and from what we've seen and heard about some of the forthcoming apps, I might just change my mind.
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