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"By Michael V. Copeland and Lindsay Blakely\nInstant messaging startup Meebo has opened up its online service to outside developers. It has become &amp;#8212; wait for it &amp;#8212; a platform.\nIn its new guise, Meebo will allow hand-picked developers to put their browser-based applications in front of the site\u2019s 6 million monthly unique users. The widgets will exploit IM technology to focus on instantaneous interactions between the folks on your buddy list. The first applications announced by Meebo include audio chat, video chat and a video broadcast service that allows you to stream video to all your friends at once. (Think of it as your own live TV show.) Other buddy-friendly apps in the offing include a digital map mashup that could be accessed simultaneously by multiple users. You could debate the merits of a particular bar or restaurant, for example. Games are another obvious category, Battleship anyone?\nMeebo CEO Seth Sternberg is quick to point out that he and the Meebo co-founders had this platform idea two years ago when they were first pitching the Mountain View, Calif., company to investors like Sequoia Capital. While that may be true, Facebook did it first, and is effectively the largest social network platform on the planet these days. And don\u2019t forget that other massive social networks like MySpace and Bebo are busy working on their own platform plays. The big question is, is their room for more than one, even a handful of these platform plays?\n\u201CWhat it comes down to is that an attractive platform is directly related to the number of users it can bring to the developers,\u201D says Jeremy Liew, a partner at venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners. \u201CIf that\u2019s the case, not everyone can be a platform.\u201D\nFacebook and Meebo are already competing for users\u2019 time.  Now they will be competing for developers\u2019 attention and efforts. Meebo\u2019s tack, and it\u2019s a smart one, is to pay developers more to do their coding for Meebo. The startup will share with the developer half the advertising revenue any application generates. And rather than let developers hawk ads, Meebo will do the selling for the site. Facebook leaves ad sales to the outside developers, and while a few of the most popular Facebook applications make money for their creators, the vast majority do not. \u201CThese people are engineers,\u201D Sternberg says. \u201CThey\u2019re good at coding applications, not selling ads.\u201D\nThe Meebo gang also claims their service is not a direct competitor to Facebook\u2019s. \u201CFacebook is all about leaving a message for someone to pick up later, it\u2019s asynchronous,\u201D says Sternberg. \u201CWe are all about live, synchronous communication. It\u2019s very different and those developers that have tried it on Facebook have not found an audience.\u201D\nMeebo is welcoming those developers to their side of the social network playground. And there is reason to believe if Meebo can offer them the right kind of distribution and the right kind of remuneration, they will take that offer. Popular widgetmaker RockYou, for one, sees the opportunity in developing its multimedia slideshows and other social networking widgets on top of Meebo.\n\u201CPeople haven\u2019t thought that much about IM because the software has always been proprietary,\u201D says RockYou co-founder Jia Shen. He notes there\u2019s no reason why Meebo can\u2019t become as successful a platform as Facebook. Unlike the social network, \u201CMeebo is going to be more focused on real-time interaction -\u2013 that\u2019s its advantage.\u201D\nStill, there is nothing to prevent Facebook from developing its own IM service to try to keep its members and all the developers to itself. Or not bother and just buy Meebo, says StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp. \u201CThey\u2019ve got to do something with that $250 million they just got.\u201D"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://fortune.com/2007/10/30/meebos-platform-play/>