Say adios to the Meebo Bar on June 6th

Google is dropping the service to focus on Google+ Sign-In and plug-ins

When Google purchased Meebo in June of last year, for a reported $100 million, it shut down nearly all of Meebo's products, including Meebo Messenger, Sharing on Meebo, Meebo Me, and all of Meebo’s apps. In fact, the only Meebo service that continued to operate was the Meebo Bar, which allows users to build an “interest profile” by favoriting things they like on different websites.

Well, now you can strike that one off the list as well. The Meebo Bar will be retired on June 6th so that the company can put more of its focus on Google products, it was announced Sunday. 

"As part of the Google team, this continues to be our focus, but we want to best serve mobile and desktop publishers moving forward.  Therefore, we have decided to focus our resources on initiatives like the recently launched Google+ Sign-In (which includes interactive posts and over-the-air app installs) and the Google+ plug-ins," Meebo wrote.

The Meebo Bar had been incorporated into different web sites, such as TV Guide, TMZ and Entertainment Weekly. It will stop loading on the 6th, and the Meebo Bar dashboard, as well as any analytics gleaned from it, will be available until June 30th. Access to analytics will be available beyond that date for those who download them via the "save to csv" link on the individual stats pages.

Of course, anyone with a Meebo Bar currently installed is free to uninstall it as soon as they would like to. Google recommends that those that added it through their CMS tools, for example Blogger, Wordpress or TypePad, should use those tools to remove it as well.

For users that created custom widgets using Meebo Bar, they can copy them from the custom button tool on their dashboard.

Founded in 2005, Mountain View, California-based Meebo never truly found its identity. It started out as an instant messaging service, before venturing into a failed chat room service called “Meebo Rooms.” The Meebo Bar, it’s most successful product, was launched in 2009.

In its lifetime, Meebo raised over $60 million total, including $25 million in series C funding in 2008 from Jafco Ventures, Time Warner Investments and KTB Ventures and $27.5 million in series D funding in 2010 from Khosla Ventures, as well as past investors Sequoia Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Time Warner, and Jafco.

Google’s app cleanup project

Getting rid of the Meebo Bar could also be seen as a continuation of Google's quest to rid itself of outdated and redundant products.

The process began in July 2011, after Larry Page took over as CEO, following the departure of Eric Schmidt.

In January 2012, Google announced its New Year’s resolution: to continue refocusing on building good products for their users. Part of that process meant cutting out useless and repetitive products..

The phrase used at the time was “More wood behind fewer arrows.”

Since then, over 50 products were altered, or removed, including Google Apps for Teams, Google Listen and Google Video for Business, as well at least 150 Google-created blogs for products and services, in August.

In December Google dropped the free version of its Google Apps For Businesses, and most recently got rid of Google Reader.

(Image source: https://www.earlylearninghq.org)