May 15, 2007 - Mountain View, Calif. - meebo, a website for instant messaging (IM), today announced meebo rooms, the latest way to connect people live on the Web. meebo rooms are places where people can chat and view media live with IM buddies, both inside meebo.com and across the Web on their own pages. In conjunction with this announcement, meebo joins forces with blip.tv, Capitol Music Group, CNET Networks, CollegeHumor, Flixster, Hearst Magazine Group’s Popular Mechanics, Jive Records, MTV Networks’ GameTrailers.com, NBC Universal, RockYou, Sugar Publishing, Veoh, Wenner Media’s US TV, and VIBE Magazine to provide video content to meebo’s five million unique monthly visitors and power communities on partner sites. The company also announced that it will begin testing advertising on the meebo.com site.

“At meebo, our mission is to connect people live across the Web,” said Seth Sternberg, CEO and co-founder of meebo Inc. “meebo rooms make it possible for people to chat with their buddies, find fun people to talk to and share neat stuff live on the Web, with no download or software required.”

A meebo room for every user
Starting today, meebo’s 2 million registered users will discover a meebo room icon on their buddy list, and everyone who logs into meebo will notice a list of featured rooms at the bottom of meebo.com. Users can subscribe to their favorite rooms by adding the rooms to their buddy list and can easily invite friends via IM or email. Those friends can then join the room immediately without having to login to any IM accounts.

meebo rooms let people pull-in media (video, music and photos) from their favorite websites to view and listen to, chat synchronously with room participants, and embed these same rooms onto profiles, blogs and websites. Visitors on a webpage with an embedded meebo room can participate in the conversation and view a room’s media exactly as the room appears at meebo.com or any other web site where it has been embedded – creating one connected conversation, syndicated across the Web.

Partner content through meebo rooms
meebo rooms provide brands and content providers with a unique opportunity to distribute content and branding, instantly, to the over one million people that log into meebo every day. In addition, because they can be embedded as Flash widgets, meebo rooms can act as syndication tools for brands looking to link multiple communities across the Web, while controlling their content. Content partners can leverage the RSS standard to populate their meebo rooms with their most current media content, thus equipping brand followers and meebo room subscribers with up-to-date content that fuels community-driven marketing and buzz creation. Visit meebo.com/rooms today to browse meebo rooms from blip.tv, Capitol Music Group, CNET Networks, CollegeHumor, Flixster, Jive Records, MTV Networks’ GameTrailers.com, NBC Universal, Popular Mechanics, Sugar Publishing, Veoh, Wenner Media’s US TV, and VIBE Magazine.

"VIBE Magazine is excited to be working with meebo for the launch of meebo rooms,” said John Demarchi, General Manager, Vibe Digital Media. “Live chat around our videos is something that our readers will use and enjoy. We’re looking forward to rolling out meebo’s technology to the VIBE community."

"In our quest to reinvent television, we are very excited to partner with meebo,” said Dmitry Shapiro, CEO, Veoh Networks, “Their cutting-edge community building synchs really well with the desire of consumers to connect over popular video content available on Veoh.”

Integrating meebo rooms for partners
meebo is additionally working with several top media companies and social networks to power instant communication on their own sites with a fully-integrated, skin-able version of meebo rooms. Over the next several weeks, Capitol Music Group, Flixster, Jive Records, Popular Mechanics, Sugar Publishing, and VIBE Magazine, as well as existing partner Amie Street, will integrate meebo rooms into their websites to enhance engagement with their content. For example, in partnership with Capitol Music Group, the multi-national record company will create a meebo room for rapper MIMS, stocked with videos of the New York-born artist, at meebo.com, as well as on his official websites and social network profiles, to syndicate a synchronous conversation and viewing experience across multiple websites.

“meebo has created a superb application for enabling band-to-fan and fan-to-fan communication while simultaneously streaming music and videos from the amazing roster of Capitol Music artists,” said Syd Schwartz, Senior Vice President, Digital Strategy, Capitol Music Group. “We’re excited to be adding meebo rooms to Capitol Music artist websites, and enabling fans to syndicate Capitol Music meebo rooms on their blogs and social networking pages.”

SOURCE meebo Inc.