At GigaOM’s recent Structure 08 event, Meebo co-founder and engineering chief, Sandy Jen, joined a panel to talk about scaling your computing infrastructure for explosive growth. Jen also spoke with Found|READ, this time to offer founders tips on how to overcome what she calls the internal scaling challenge: hiring.

Meebo launched in September 2005, when it unveiled the first Ajax application that allowed users to access several instant messaging clients (AIM, Jabber, Google Talk, etc.) from its home page. Back then, Jen and co-founders Seth Sternberg and Elaine Wherry were bootstrapping, even using personal credit cards to lease the three servers they needed in order to launch. With no money left over for marketing, they went guerrilla.

“Digg had started about six months earlier, so we said, ‘Let’s just Digg ourselves,’” Jen recalled. “We wrote a quick description of Meebo — ‘Web IM: AIM! Yahoo!; No downloads; draggable windows! It’s free!’— and went to bed. The next morning we had 600 Diggs, and our servers were overloaded.”

Three years later, Meebo has raised $37.5 million in venture capital, has all sorts of new products (and servers), gets 30 million unique visitors a month, and faces its toughest scaling challenge yet: “The No. 1 thing we worry about is hiring,” said Jen. To keep up with user demand, Meebo must grown to 50 employees from its current 30 by 2009 — a 67 percent increase.

In a fast-growing startup, maintaining your core values is crucial. “But how do you hire and keep your small team culture? It’s really hard,” Jen told us. “In the beginning it’s easy to ask your friends and people you trust for names. But eventually you’ll tap out your networks. Then where do you look for talent?”

In order to uncover new recruits — and not just the very talented people, but the right people — for her company, Jen has developed a few tricks:

1. Go to industry events. You want to hire people who are interested in the same things that you’re interested in. That means reaching out to people who attend the same events that you do. Once you’ve seen the same person at four of five events, make your move. 2. Keep track of smart comments in blogs and forums. Pay attention to the people who are commenting smartly on the stories you’re reading — especially if they’re doing so frequently. This is an indicator of their engagement and passion.

3. Look for people through your extra-curricular activities. You want people interested in your technology, but the right cultural fit means finding people who share your other values, too. A good indicator of shared values is a shared extra-curricular activity. Do you rock climb? Play ultimate Frisbee? (Jen does.) Common fun offers opportunities for bonding, which can be a great way to find new staff.

4. Go outside your geographic circle. There’s a lot of talent in the world. One of the first things Meebo did was commission its graphic design from a guy in Italy, whose work they found on an art web site. They hired him on a trial basis; today he’s Meebo’s Agent Icon.

5. Leverage contract arrangements. As Jen acknowledged, getting H-1B visas is a long process and a pain in the butt. But they’re worth it. If you find someone you want on your team, get them in the door, excited about your company and under contract as soon as possible. Meebo usually has six or seven people working under contract at any time.

6. Commit and be generous. Really talented people rarely advertise themselves, at least not as much as we’d like them to. You must court them. There is a lot of competition, so this could mean being flexible with hours or remote work options. And once you decide to hire someone, you have to welcome them with open arms.

7. Fire fast. When someone isn’t working out, have them leave quickly. In three years, two people have left Meebo — one left in three weeks, the other, in a few months. But a bad fit will contaminate your culture. You can’t afford that.

(Photo credit: Lea Suzuki, San Francisco Chronicle.) For more on how Jen manages Meebo’s infrastructure, check out her interview with Om, below.

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Posted by Carleen Hawn on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  16 Comments
Tags: AIM, Ajax, Elaine Wherry, Google Talk, jabber, Meebo, Om Malik, Sandy Jen, Seth Sternberg, StructureO8, venture funding, Yahoo Messenger

In case we needed proof that social gaming is hot, look no further than the not one but two Silicon Valley conferences being held this month that are dedicated to the space. Yet with representatives at Interplay and the Social Gaming Summit from companies as far afield as Meebo, IMVU and Kongregate, it makes you wonder if there is anything linking these companies together at all. It’s time to define what we mean by social gaming, so that we can better focus on the actual value we are creating for the players themselves — and avoid the trap of slapping a sparkly new phrase on any gaming startup that wanders onto the scene.

Just as social networking is a tag applied to just about anything community-related on the web, it is temping to lump every game that has chat or a shared leaderboard under the social gaming umbrella. But to do so muddies the water of a category that just may be the natural progression from social networking. While social networking is focused on connecting people together, we should expect the best of social gaming to be about creating and building relationships with those friends. Not every multiplayer game is a social game, and by looking at it this way we can see that social gaming has a lot more in common with Wii Sports, Rock Band and Monopoly than it does with single-player casual games like Bejeweled or Bloons.

Texas Hold’em Poker is a great example of a synchronous social game. Playing a game of Texas Hold’em Poker with a friend tells me a host of things that last far longer than the game, including their level of aggression, willingness to bluff, and proclivity for risk. It’s also in the camp of games designed to rely on fast feedback in order to give a sense of being “there” with your fellow players. This real-time nature ties Texas Hold’em to synchronous communities that include Kart Rider, World of Warcraft and Club Penguin.

Synchronous social games feel like real-time card games at their lightest, and like Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games at their deepest. The unifier for synchronous startups such as I’minlikewithyou, Three Rings, and Habbo Hotel, is that in an increasingly “always on” world in which we are overwhelmed with choices, the high-value online communities of tomorrow will be the ones that get users past the “snacking phase” of browsing and asynchronous interactions to a place where they are engaged with each other.

This is in direct contrast to the other crop of social gaming companies, typified by Scrabuluous, that rely on turn-based asynchronous game mechanics to lower the stress level and focus on playing with your current crop of friends. Games such as Social Gaming Network’s Warbook, Ikarium, and Serious Games’ Friends for Sale have the benefit of closely matching the current behavioral model of social networks in which posting to walls and poking one other serve as the primary modes of communication. These games allow users to take time to make their decisions, they integrate well with a players current set of friends, and they do not require the “presence” that real-time games require.

Conduit Labs, the startup we founded a year ago this month, is firmly in the camp of creating a new, real-time social entertainment network. Despite this, however, I don’t think synchronous social gaming is going to “win” over asynchronous. They simply represent two very different types of play on the web, one ideal for maintaining relationships and the other for creating new ones. Just as there is room for both email and IM, there are key things that make each valuable.

To use an offline analogy, imagine trying to start a relationship, from scratch, entirely through sending snail mail back and forth. On the flip side, imagine trying to get 15 of your best friends to agree to get together at a concert. It’s a scheduling nightmare that might work in a rare situation, but you might as well just grab coffee with a couple of them at a time. In other words, synchronous gaming is a powerful way to build new relationships and have deeper interactions with current friends, asynchronous gaming is perfect for low-pressure friend/acquaintance maintenance.

What both of these modes of play have in common — and what separates them from other multiplayer games and the single-player gaming industry — is the real world social resonance of their activities. When a friend changes their relationship status on Facebook to “single” there is a emotional meaning that transcends the site. Similarly, there are the stories of Monopoly leading to long-term family feuds, to marriages that started from playing World of Warcraft, and to the effects of Rock Band on a group of friends at a party. Social gaming holds the promise of letting us have a little fun together online in a way that has meaning. That’s something worth remembering over the coming months as a slew of startups try to use the term social gaming to define everything in sight.

Written by Nabeel Hyatt, one of the co-founders of Conduit Labs.

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Posted by Nabeel Hyatt on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  22 Comments
Tags: conduit labs, imvu, Meebo, social gaming, world of warcraft

Neither Om nor I are shy about talking infrastructure, but the High Scalability blog has gone totally geek and parsed the details of how Facebook plans to scale its new Jabber chat service to 70 million members using a hella lot of servers and Erlang. As Sandy Jen over at Meebo can tell you, chat is a challenge to scale because it requires a constantly open connection to the servers and low latency. That’s a recipe for a lot of hardware and some flexible architecture. Good thing Facebook has $100 million to spend, but bad news for the firm if the money spigot closes.

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My Early Black Friday Deal Arrived — Panasonic HDC-SD10 jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel "; Pie Guy: Web Apps as Viable Alternatives TheAppleBlog – by Olly Farshi "; Palm Press: Backup Failures; EU Getting webOS Update jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; No Flash on Your iPhone? How About Silverlight, Instead? TheAppleBlog – by Liam Cassidy ";

Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  1 Comments
Tags: facebook, Meebo, Sandy Jen

MySpace Mobile is now live at http://m.myspace.com. You can do most of things you do on MySpace via the mobile page like Reading, composing and replying to MySpace Messages, viewing photo albums and posting comments or blog entries. During the beta phase, MySpace Mobile Web was getting about a million unique visitors per day, the company claims.

Meebo raising another $25-to-$30 million at a valuation of $250 million? Matt Marshall thinks that in the current economic environment it is going to be hard for the company to get the money. He forgets Meebo’s backers include generous folks at DFJ.

Jack Meyers says “Media Industry is in an Unprecedented State of Economic Disarray.” I would say that is an understatement. “The focus instead, it seems, is on advertising as a commodity rather than advertising as a tool for building brand awareness and sales.”

Sick & Tired of seeing the Universal Service Fund (USF) phone tax revenues go waste and spent on illogical projects? Then speak up at Cap The Fund. By the way, USF phone tax is set to jump in the second quarter of 2008 from 10.2 percent to 11.3 percent of carrier revenues collected from phone consumers.

This overwhelming need to couch everything we are doing these days in terms of these so-called new social media might be fine as a way to create a new business niche as companies try desperately to use any available trick to gain market share; but really do companies – or people for that matter – need this new media they way they are being led to believe. [WinExtra by Steve Hodson]

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  3 Comments
Tags: Meebo, myspace mobile

That was the question asked of the four panelists on Monday’s Scalability Boot Camp Panel at South by Southwest. The panelists, who represented various consumer sites, all said that at some point in their online ventures the answer to that question was no. As a result they’ve ended up learning how to build network architectures that can support a large number of users.

One way (are you listening Yahoo?) was to restrict launches by making them available to a limited amount of people over a fixed period of time, because no one server can handle all the users of a site hopping on all at once. Another was to figure out what your users want before trying to figure out your network architecture. Blaine Cook of Twitter confessed that when they launched their service, no one was sure what people would use it for, calling it the worst idea ever.

All the talk about failure led to a discussion about how scalability problems hurt or enhance a company’s reputation. Cook said the press mentions of Twitter’s downtime as a plus, but the irritated users were obviously a minus. Sandy Jen, co-founder of IM service Meebo, echoed comments made by Jakob Heuser of Gaia Online when she talked about letting users know what’s going on while the site is down.

She also emphasized the importance of getting the business side involved with the technical and operations side. “No feature gets out the door without talking to operations” at Meebo, she said.

The audience members seemed most concerned in how to get the business side talking about scalability issues, while the panelists, all of whom had technical backgrounds, talked about focusing on the user experience and trying to translate down time into money. All good advice, but I imagine that conversation is much easier to have at a startup led by a tech-savvy CEO.

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My Early Black Friday Deal Arrived — Panasonic HDC-SD10 jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel "; Pie Guy: Web Apps as Viable Alternatives TheAppleBlog – by Olly Farshi "; Palm Press: Backup Failures; EU Getting webOS Update jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; No Flash on Your iPhone? How About Silverlight, Instead? TheAppleBlog – by Liam Cassidy ";

Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  11 Comments
Tags: Blaine Cook, Gaia Online, Jakob Heuser, Meebo, Sandy Jen, Structure, Twitter

Meebo, the Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up that popularized web-based instant messaging, is celebrating its second anniversary today. The three-person company we first wrote about in September 2005 is growing up literally and figuratively. The company is expanding beyond its instant messaging roots and is now embracing realtime interactions via what co-founder Seth Sternberg described as Meebo Platform.

The company is offering application programming interface (API) to its community of web-based IM users that will allow developers to write essentially widgets to the Meebo platform. Sternberg described this as a move to go beyond the IM and embrace “real time interactions” around your pre-existing social network, “your buddy list.” [Screen Shots below the fold]

“IM is a real time synchronous communication, and with this new API we are making applications more synchronous,” he said. The initial applications that be launched and shared with IM users are mostly centered around voice and video sharing. Four start-ups including Tokbox and Pudding allow you to instantly video and voice chat with your IM buddies. Given that these are web-based applications, no software downloads are required.

In the near future, developers can for instance write a co-mapping application, which allows you to look up a restaurant, and read Yelp reviews in real time and decide over the IM if you and your buddies want to go have a meal there. How about a game application that you can play in real with your IM buddies?

Sternberg is confident that developers will cook up many ways to leverage their platform. The company will offer ads in these applications (much like Facebook) and will split the revenues with the developers. Meebo, for now is going to keep a tight control on which applications get on its platform, and will be approving it over the time.

The bottom line is that Meebo is capitalizing on two trends that are going to take further momentum: collaboration and real time interactions. Whether the company can become a worthy competitor to other social platforms, that remains to be seen.

Disclosure: Meebo is funded by True Ventures, as is GigaOM.

Related Posts:

• Meebo adds media viewing rooms
• Last desktop app standing, IM
• How to Tokbox and spam your friends.

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My Early Black Friday Deal Arrived — Panasonic HDC-SD10 jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel "; Pie Guy: Web Apps as Viable Alternatives TheAppleBlog – by Olly Farshi "; Palm Press: Backup Failures; EU Getting webOS Update jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; No Flash on Your iPhone? How About Silverlight, Instead? TheAppleBlog – by Liam Cassidy ";

Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  11 Comments
Tags: Instant messaging, Meebo