Almost five years back, Meebo used to be a life-saver for many of us aspiring engineers in the campus, where all IM sites or software were blocked by the university lab firewall. The Meebo Messenger service would let us chat and connect with friends over GTalk, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Messenger, etc. in a single browser! Till the pesky network administrator discovered the site himself, of course!
Today, Meebo has come a long away. From being an integrated instant messenger service provider to the Meebo bar that would encourage site users to propagate a site’s content through social media, to being acquired by one of the world’s largest technology companies, Meebo is definitely going places!
Google made an announcement on Monday that it would be acquiring Meebo – the advertising and social media company, so as to add Meebo’s competencies to accelerate its very own Google+ efforts. Just like any other acquisition, there seem to be rumors about how personnel would be retained, key stakeholders would be brought in and what the estimated deal value would be. Although the concerned spokesperson declined to provide information about the deal and the terms of purchase, TechCrunch has sources, which say that the deal value would be $100 million.
Apart from its social media expertise, Google has also comfortably acquired a large install base of around 100 million monthly active users, to whom Google will now push Google+. Smart move, we say!
Until the next acquisition that is!
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