Meebo Platform Launches With Big San Francisco Party
Sequoia backed Meebo launches Meebo Platform this evening, allowing third party developers to create applications for the Meebo web chat service. They're celebrating the launch with a big party in San Francisco with hundreds of the company's closest friends.
Context & Ripple Effects
Meebo has spent 2007 turning a single-purpose web chat client into a layered product: the company added Meebo Rooms and its first advertising in May, then pushed onto the iPhone with a web app in August, by which point coverage already billed it as the reigning champion of web-based chat. The Sequoia-backed company, which began life bootstrapped by its founders before raising venture money in late 2005, now takes the next step — opening its service so third-party developers can build applications on top of it.
The launch matters because it changes what Meebo is: no longer just a place to chat from any browser, but a surface other software gets built on. The San Francisco party framing aside, the strategic move is the platform itself.
First-order effects
- Third-party developers gain official access to build applications for Meebo's web chat audience, converting Meebo from a closed product into a development target overnight.
- Meebo itself takes on platform-operator duties — API maintenance, app review and ecosystem governance — on top of running the chat service.
Second-order effects
- With advertising only recently introduced in May, a developer ecosystem gives Meebo more surfaces and sessions where ads can run, deepening the monetization layer the company began building this year.
- Rivals in web-based messaging face pressure to match the openness or risk losing mindshare among developers choosing where to build social applications.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, 2007's consumer web services will increasingly be judged as platforms rather than products — with developer ecosystems, not feature lists, deciding which chat and social services accumulate users and revenue.
- A generation of venture-backed startups is being pushed to open up early, since platform positioning shapes acquisition appeal and follow-on fundraising for companies like Meebo.
The trend: Consumer web services are racing to open developer platforms in 2007, turning single-purpose tools like web chat into application ecosystems that compete for third-party builders.