Meebo Launches Meebo Rooms

Meebo, a web based IM service, has launched a new feature called Meebo Rooms that allows users to create their own chat rooms.

Users could create chat rooms and invite upto 80 friends to the room. The rooms could be customized and themed and could also be embedded into other websites. Once a chat room is created you can invite others to the room, they will receive a URL, clicking which will immediately let them join the room even if they are not a Meebo user. In case you are a Meebo user, you could add the chat room to your buddy list and click on it to join the room whenever you want.

Users can also embed media into the chat rooms. If any user sends a link of a youtube video or Flickr photo it automatically gets embedded into the room for others to see or view. Yahoo was the first one to release this feature when they announced the Zync plugin for Yahoo Messenger. Google soon followed suit and also allowed users to share and view videos and photos in their Google Talk client.

In addition to the feature release Meebo has also made a good progress on the business development end. They have signed up alot of partners including Blip.tv, Capitol Music Group’s Capitol Records and Virgin Records, CNET, College Humor, Flixster, GameTrailers.com, Jive Records, NBC Universal, Pop Sugar, Popular Mechanics, RockYou, Veoh, Us Weekly’s Us TV, and VIBE Magazine. All these partners get to launch their own branded chat rooms on Meebo. Check out this room from CNet as an example.

Meebo has also beefed up advertisement and just in case you want to enjoy a cool video on the chat room with your friends, beware that a 15-30 seconds ad could start playing every once in a while.

Joost is also making use of this form of advertising and is serving pre-roll advertisements in between the videos. The ads could not be skipped and are displayed randomly so you can not predict when one shows up. Google on the other hand is still unable to offer pre-roll advertisement on Youtube, something for which it has received a lot of slack as well.

Meebo has raised $12.5 million to-date in two funding rounds from Sequoia Capital and DFJ. The company is based in Silicon Valley and has 16 employees.

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