Meebo Eyes A New Market For Its Chat Bar: Online Retailers

We've been covering the growth of Meebo's chat bar extensively since its launch: after a fairly slow ramp up in 2008, it's since been deployed to 130 partner sites and now has a reach of 100 million unique visitors. Now that the company has landed partnerships with a number of large publisher sites and social networks, it's settings its sights on a new target: shopping. The company has been approached by various online retailers to see how they could help make shopping sites more social, and now they're making an effort to expand into the market. From a functionality standpoint, Meebo isn't changing much about the bar to suit retailers â€" you'll still drag and drop items to share them with friends, and you can chat with buddies using integrated services like Google Talk, Facebook Chat, and AIM. The big differences will lie in the monetization strategy and the level of analytics retailers will be able to take advantage of.