You can “check in” to locations in the real world with your phone; now Meebo wants to bring the same idea to the web. The company, which offers a sharing toolbar that lets users connect to social networks while they surf, is launching a new version that allows them to check in to any site that offers the Meebo bar, and also allows them to follow other users and see what websites they are visiting. Available as a browser extension as of Tuesday, the company said the new features will be rolled out to all sites using the toolbar by mid-December.

Meebo’s existing toolbar sits at the bottom of a website — much like other toolbars that can be downloaded and installed by users — but the Meebo bar is added by individual website publishers — including TMZ, Justin.tv and Entertainment Weekly — through a few lines of JavaScript. Users can log into — or create — a Meebo account that connects to their Facebook, Twitter and various instant messenger accounts, then share a link to the site via the toolbar, or even drag and drop individual elements of the page (images, videos, etc.) onto the bar in order to share them with friends.

Meebo founder and CEO Seth Sternberg says the company heard from users that many wanted to know what sites their friends were visiting, but didn’t necessarily get that kind of information from Facebook. “On Facebook, they can see what sites their friends were looking at last night, but not the sites they’re on right now,” he said. So the startup decided to build the ability to “check in” and tell others where you are as you surf, as well as a “follow” function (following another user means that that you get to see their check-ins at the various sites they visit, if they choose to share them).

While on a site with the toolbar, users can click and check in at the site, and can also see any of their friends who have also checked in there, and — if they choose to enable it — can share that information with Facebook or Twitter. Sternberg says that after a certain number of visits, users can become VIPs on specific sites, which allows websites to offer them discounts, in the same way some retailers using Foursquare or Facebook Places offer return visitors deals on merchandise. Meebo will also be offering sites that don’t use the toolbar a “check in” button for their pages.

Meebo has plenty of users who already make use of its cross-platform IM service and web-based messaging, but will users take to another service that wants them to check in somewhere and follow people, even if they can share that status easily with Facebook and other networks they already use? Sternberg says the optimistic view of a recent Pew survey — which showed that few people use location-sharing services — is there is still plenty of room to convince them to do so.

“Check-ins haven’t been done in any kind of meaningful way on the web,” the Meebo founder said. “We think we can truly drive new social discovery through these features.” Sternberg says Meebo reaches about 190 million unique visitors a month via the more than 8,000 websites that run its toolbar, and almost half those users are in the U.S., which means the company reaches about a third of U.S. Internet users. How many of them want to check in to the sites they are visiting — and share the news that they are doing so with others — remains to be seen.

Disclosure: Meebo is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Arvind Grover

But do we really need the option of sharing on so many random services? What if those sharing widgets had a bit of intelligence about what a certain user already prefers, and just showed her the options she’s likely to use? That’s the aim of a new open platform called XAuth that’s being released on Monday by Meebo, with the support of Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Yahoo, JanRain, Disqus and Gigya.

XAuth detects whether or not a user is logged into a service, or has recently done so, by looking at his browser history by checking for a local XAuth token left using the XAuth JavaScript API. Then a publisher can prominently display those preferred social networks and communication sites, in the hope that seeing their favorite logos will make users more likely to connect and share.

The tool will clearly be useful for Meebo, which offers a service to encourage sharing called the Meebo Bar that runs alongside the bottom of hundreds of sites, reaching an estimated 120 million users per month. But XAuth could be all the more useful if many web services choose to use the same code, which Meebo plans to open-source and place under the care of the Open Identity Exchange or the OpenID Foundation. It’s promising that so many large web services have already signed on, if only for the inaugural press release.

However, Clearspring is absent from that list of partners, as is Facebook, which would prefer that everyone used Facebook Connect. Facebook is expected to launch its own sharing toolbar that would compete with Meebo’s as early as this week at its f8 developer conference in San Francisco.

I think visiting a web site that knows I’m logged in elsewhere could get a little creepy. Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg said that XAuth won’t know anything about a user’s email address or login, and that it’s a way to pass data around with privacy restrictions and white-listing intact. Further, he said, XAuth could be extended in ways that make it more worthwhile for users. For instance, if you were reading an article on a newspaper’s site, it might be nice to see a feed of your social gaming activity pop up, alerting you to head back to another site to resume playing.

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Meebo is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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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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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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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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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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.

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