Meebo Not!
I just saw in the San Jose Mercury News issue for last Sunday that Meebo got $3.5M from Sequoia Capital. If this is not the start of Bust 2.0 then I am not sure what is (may be its the end of Bubble 2.0?)
Meebo has a simple Ajax/DHTML based UI that lets you connect to IM networks through a web browser. The UI is cool and everything, but the only reason Meebo had such strong growth was that large corporations and government offices around the world block the standard IM ports for security and productivity reasons. Meebo represented a loophole and got tons of users that way.
For example, my mother is a general manager in the tax authority in Egypt (the equivalent of the IRS here), and she was very upset when the government offices closed all IM ports last year; she now loves Meebo, its her only way to IM while at work.
The question is: how long do you think it will be until these corporations start to block meebo.com? and why would Sequoia fund something like that? Are they “betting” these 3 gals can build lots of other interesting web apps?
Sorry Meebo, but my prediction is that you are going down.
— Amr
PS: My blog is the number one result now in Google if you search for Google Hatred, funny, huh 😉 Seriously though, I do not hate Google, I hate what Google did to Yahoo (though its as much Yahoo’s mistake as it is their’s).