These are my notes from the session on Success Story: MeeboMe.
Meebo started as a way for the founders to stay in touch with each other when they were at places where they couldn't install their IM client of choice. They realized that Instant Messaging hadn't really met the potential of Web and decided to create a startup to bring IM to the Web. Today they have grown to a site with 1 million logins daily, 4 million unique users a month and 64 million messages sent a day.
Their design principles have been quite straightforward. They have used Flash and protocols like Jabber/XMPP that already exist and that they are familiar with to ease development. They try to keep features to a minimum and focus on making Meebo.com act like the traditional IM experience. They have had t deal with performance issues around sending/receiving messages and showing changes to a user's online presence without significant lag. They are also very driven by user feedback and the Meebo blog is embedded in the Meebo web experience when users sign in. User feedback is how they determined that being able to show emoticons in instant messages was more important to users than being able to add IM buddies from Meebo.
MeeboMe is used in a lot of places such as education by high school teachers and college professors as way to give students a way to contact them. Librarians have also used it as a way to have patrons contact the librarian about questions by placing the MeeboMe widget on the front page of the library's website. There is a radio DJ takes requests from the MeeboMe widget on his site. There are also retail sites that use MeeboMe for customer support. One trend they didn't expect is that people place different MeeboMe widgets on different pages on their site si they can have a different buddy list entry for each page.
During the Q&A someone asked if MeeboMe drove account creation on Meebo.com and the answer was "Yes". They had their largest number of new accounts up to that date when they launched the widget.