meebo rooms – A way to Connect People, Conversations and Media Across the Web, released

Instant messaging (IM) website meebo has launched meebo rooms, which is the new way to connect people live on the internet. So what exactly are meebo rooms? Well, they are avenues where people can chat and view media live with IM buddies, both inside meebo.com and across the web on their own pages.

Along with this announcement, meebo ties-up with nig names including blip.tv, Capitol Music Group, CNET Networks, CollegeHumor, Flixster, Hearst Magazine Group’s Popular Mechanics, Jive Records, MTV Networks’ GameTrailers.com, NBC Universal, RockYou, Sugar Publishing, Veoh, Wenner Media’s US TV, and VIBE Magazine to offere video content to meebo’s five million unique monthly visitors and power communities on partner sites. In addition, the company has revealed that it will start testing advertising on the meebo.com site.

Seth Sternberg, CEO and co-founder of meebo Inc. said, “At meebo, our mission is to connect people live across the Web. meebo rooms make it possible for people to chat with their buddies, find fun people to talk to and share neat stuff live on the Web, with no download or software required.”

“We’ve seen that if we subtly promote those Rooms to users, they check it out,” said Martin Green, VP of business for Meebo. “Sometimes they talk about the content. Sometimes they talk to each other inside a room that belongs to Popular Mechanics for example, and they might pull in their buddies.”

The main features of meebo rooms are:

No software to install, as the meebo chat rooms are entirely browser-based, and implemented with slick Ajax techniques rather than the prickly Java

No need to have Meebo accounts for chatting purposes. In fact, you can send invitations via IM to people on any major network, and they can be in your chat room within seconds.

Meebo Rooms can have a media window that enables any chatter paste in videos from YouTube and MetaCafe and photo sets from Flickr; all chatters can then see the media and discuss it

Rooms exist at Meebo’s own site, but you can also embed them in any website, giving anyone with an online presence the ability to have a chat room

Anybody can create rooms, however Meebo has also signed up some partners, such as Popular Mechanics, CNET, Veoh, Virgin, Blip.tv, and others, who will be using Rooms to distribute content