I was expecting this or a shut-down announcement soon. Meebo has never been able to provide something valuable to enough people to become a going concern.
Google buys Meebo
51–60 of 116 posts
Re: Google buys Meebo
#52I was expecting this or a shut-down announcement soon. Meebo has never been able to provide something valuable to enough people to become a going concern.
I don't think that's true. They had a lot of people using their messenger client.
More to do with mistakes and execution. Why did they take $70m in funding? That's a ridiculous amount of investment to take.
Why couldn't they monetize that amount of eyeballs?
Re: Google buys Meebo
#53I was expecting this or a shut-down announcement soon. Meebo has never been able to provide something valuable to enough people to become a going concern.
I don't think that's true. They had a lot of people using their messenger client. More to do with mistakes and execution. Why did they take $70m in funding? That's a ridiculous amount of investment to take. Why couldn't they monetize that amount of eyeballs?
I know they had a lot of users, but I don't see how they were making money off the client and they had a lot of employees.
Maybe the spam thing was working for them but I don't think they would have folded if so.
Re: Google buys Meebo
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. I'm just as tired of seeing it repeated here as I was hearing people repeat "Twitter is dumb and useless and not going anywhere" 3 years ago. Just because you don't use it or subscribe to people that use it, doesn't mean the rest of us didn't take the time to actually utilize it.
People said this about Wave as well. I'm not convinced. I tried google+, I was really impressed with the UI. I used it for a few days, then a few weeks later I suddenly remembered it existed. I don't think I'm alone. Presumably they still count me as a 'user', even though I haven't used Google+ for ages.
Why do you care if they include you in their user count? Why does it bother you?
I love Google+. I love the UI. I love the interaction I have with the people I follow. They post good content, it's well featured, it's fast on mobile (which is something its competitors flatly can not claim) and the Circles model works really well. For me.
Funny, I also got a shockingly huge amount of value out of Wave. It was for very specific group-school-project sorts of things, but it has been irreplacable in terms of simplicity and strange overlapping feature set. In fact, as others have noted, many features that people wish to see in a "futuristic email 2.0" were embodied by Google Wave.
I guess I reject the notion that since you don't like/use it, no one does.
Re: Google buys Meebo
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
The talent. Meebo was started by Stanford grads who demonstrated their talent in developing a product and a launching company. It'd be a safe way to hire a few competent engineers, and I doubt the acquisition price contains much goodwill.
I doubt the talent behind meebo is worth $200M. I'd say that it's more a bailout of the investors.
The price is rumored to be $100M. Google and others regularly pay $2-3M per engineer... More for kickass devs/leaders. And certainly they'd probably pay a premium for larger dev teams. In other words, they'd rather buy 1 company with 25 engineers for $100M than lots of tiny companies (due to the corp dev overhead of buying a company).
Re: Google buys Meebo
#56Re: Google buys Meebo
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's true. They had a lot of people using their messenger client. More to do with mistakes and execution. Why did they take $70m in funding? That's a ridiculous amount of investment to take. Why couldn't they monetize that amount of eyeballs?
I know they had a lot of users, but I don't see how they were making money off the client and they had a lot of employees. Maybe the spam thing was working for them but I don't think they would have folded if so.
Sure. They had way too much investment, way too many employees, and didn't seem to have much of a handle on making money by the looks of things.
It'll be spun as a success "Acquired by Google yay!", but seems a pretty resounding failure to me.
Re: Google buys Meebo
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
People said this about Wave as well. I'm not convinced. I tried google+, I was really impressed with the UI. I used it for a few days, then a few weeks later I suddenly remembered it existed. I don't think I'm alone. Presumably they still count me as a 'user', even though I haven't used Google+ for ages.
Why do you care if they include you in their user count? Why does it bother you? I love Google+. I love the UI. I love the interaction I have with the people I follow. They post good content, it's well featured, it's fast on mobile (which is something its competitors flatly can not claim) and the Circles model works really well. For me. Funny, I also got a shockingly huge amount of value out of Wave. It was for very…
> "Why do you care if they include you in their user count? Why does it bother you?"
It bothers me if they're being dishonest. Tell me how many people actively shared things on Google+ yesterday. Telling me how many people have ever used Google+ in the past isn't useful, and is going to vastly distort peoples perception.
> "I guess I reject the notion that since you don't like/use it, no one does."
Sure, valid point. I'd reply that out of all my facebook friends, a few tried google+, and none actively use it that I know of. So it's not just me.
It's also telling that you got a huge amount of value out of Wave as well as plus. Perhaps Google+ isn't that much different to Wave... in which case it's doomed.
Release Wave -> Failing -> Buy Etherpad -> Wave fails
Release Google+ -> Failing -> Buy Meebo -> Google+ fails
Don't get me wrong, I love Google. But I can see history repeating itself here...
Re: Google buys Meebo
#59Meebo was useful, back then. Sometimes. But right now I am tempted to just respond with 'A/S/L?'.
Re: Google buys Meebo
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
People said this about Wave as well. I'm not convinced. I tried google+, I was really impressed with the UI. I used it for a few days, then a few weeks later I suddenly remembered it existed. I don't think I'm alone. Presumably they still count me as a 'user', even though I haven't used Google+ for ages.
Why do you care if they include you in their user count? Why does it bother you? I love Google+. I love the UI. I love the interaction I have with the people I follow. They post good content, it's well featured, it's fast on mobile (which is something its competitors flatly can not claim) and the Circles model works really well. For me. Funny, I also got a shockingly huge amount of value out of Wave. It was for very…
Just because it's useful for some and some people use it doesn't mean it's not a failure as a Facebook competitor (which is what we're measuring here, not whether anyone is using it). It's disingenuous to count me as a user when they compare themselves to FB because I and probably most of their other users haven't used it in months. In contrast, a large percentage of FB's user count uses Facebook all the time.