Search Engine giant, Google, made public it plans to shut down the Meebo Bar publishing tool as part of its over all plan to wind down services that are using up to many resources and not giving back any returns. The Meebo Bar will go offline on June 6 as the technology firm refocuses on its other services including Google+ Sign-In and plug-ins. Google bought Meebo last year for a reported $100 million which was a decent for the startup that was established in 2005. TechCrunch had reported at the time of acquisition that the development team was the major target for Google who wanted the staffs expertise to develop publisher tools for Google+. The plan was that Meedbo would either be rolled into the social network or be shuttered.
Sadly many Meebo services like Meebo Messenger, Sharing on Meebo, MeeboMe, and all mobile apps got the ax as soon as the firm was acquired. the only one that actually made a comeback was the Meebo Bar which surfaced in December of 2012. However it was not exactly like the old services and had Google+ sharing options. With the close of the service the Meebo Bar will not be available in any form.
Developers and designers could use the Meebo Bar to add chat features, sharing and advertisements to websites. The service was a good way to monetize websites that was fairly popular. ComScore claimed that in December 2011 Meebo was pulling in about 100 million total users every month before Google bought the company.
Event though the search engine spent a lot of money on the company it will be shutting it down along with other non-performing services like Google Cloud Connect, Google Voice App for BlackBerry and the RSS reader called Google Reader. Meebo Barr got shut down because it just did not have the user base that Google needed to justify keeping the service online. Another factor was that Meebo did not align well with Google’s mission of search, social, and advertisement.
By June 6 all sites that have the Meebo Bar installed will be not see it any more and Google asks that web developer remove the code from their sites. This will reduce the extra code available on users websites and prevent any issues from occurring later on from the code related to the discontinued Meebo Bar. Of course, with the closure of the Meebo Bar web developers will need to find another method of monetization like Google Adsense.
Source: TechCrunch
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