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Web-based instant messaging and chat service Meebo is planning to raise $25-30 million in venture funding, VentureBeat reported Monday.

This would likely peg Meebo's valuation at between $200 and $250 million, a whole lot more than the $60-70 million that it was reportedly worth after a funding round last year. As VentureBeat's Matt Marshall noted, investment banking flop Bear Stearns was just sold for $236 million. Never mind that reports show venture funding may be drying up and the economic forecast hasn't been getting any better recently.

Meebo, which is supported by advertising revenue, has reportedly hired … Read more

On Friday, a rumor surfaced that Facebook would be launching an internal instant-messaging service . Then, on Saturday, gossip blog Valleywag suggested that launching the IM service would involve acquiring Social.IM, a Facebook application that enables instant message chat between services like AIM, Yahoo, and Windows Live Messenger. A Social.IM exec coyly told Valleywag, "If we're being bought, I haven't gotten the call yet."

Social.IM is supported by venture backing from Valley icon Peter Thiel, who also has invested in Facebook.

One thing Valleywag didn't note is that in response to the rumor … Read more

Facebook plans to launch an instant-messaging application for members to embed on their profiles as early as next week, TechCrunch reported Friday.

Details are sketchy, but it appears that this will be a Web-based IM service that would allow Facebook users to chat with other people on their friends lists without needing to go through a third-party program. Additionally, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington detailed, the service would likely be based on the Jabber open-source platform, which would mean that third-party "universal IM" clients like Pidgin, Trillian, and Adium would be able to implement it.

Facebook representatives were not … Read more

There comes a point where every early adopter realizes they are no longer really adopting anything unique any more. This happens when a product becomes saturated, more available and more universal. For me, as I've seen over the past few days, that point has come to pass - at least in San Francisco.

Walking around, eating out, and driving around San Francisco, all I see are iPhones. But it's not only the young yupppie/guppie types any more. Rather, there are kids, young professionals, middle-aged folks (not so many older folks though), men, women, white, Black, Latino, Asian, … Read more

AOL is getting a lot of credit for "opening" its ubiquitous AIM instant-messaging software "to open source." However, like Microsoft did recently by revealing documentation to its APIs and protocols, all AOL has done here is open access to OSCAR protocols necessary to create open-source implementations.

This is great, but consider just how much more AOL could have done--and for its benefit--such as open-sourcing its instant-messaging server and client software.

Think about it. What revenue does AOL protect by keeping its IM software closed? Sure, there's advertising revenue from the obnoxious ads it sprays around the client, but that is thinking far too small.

The real money is in abundance. Or in "adoption-led markets," to borrow Sun Microsystems' nomenclature.… Read more

Twing is launching a new site on Tuesday where you can find out what people have written about specific topics in forums and other online communities.

The site shows search results for keywords in individual posts, topics, and whole forums and allows a lot of fine tuning for results. You can choose to include or exclude specific terms and filter so you only see items in a certain time frame, items from certain sources, or those that mention specific people or companies.

Twing searches the Web for sites and allows forum owners to submit their sites to the directory. It … Read more

Updated at 5:55 AM PT to include comments from Dell.

Dell is expanding its horizons a bit further.

The PC maker plans to acquire enterprise e-mail service MessageOne for $155 million in cash, the company said early Tuesday.

Though Dell has made very few acquisitions over its two decades in business, this one isn't that much of a stretch: Austin, Texas-based MessageOne, which manages the process of archiving, e-discovery, and long-term storage of e-mail, was founded by Adam Dell, the brother of the PC maker's CEO, Michael Dell.

To ensure fairness, the company says founder and chairman … Read more

If you're the type of person who communicates with friends, co-workers, relatives, and such via several different IM services, e-mail, and Facebook--and you know you are--software could soon offer you one of the cleanest ways ever to link them all together.

The software, called Digsby, went into private beta Tuesday, and its goal is to give people a way to organize their contacts from Yahoo Messenger, AOL IM, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, and Windows Live Messenger, as well as e-mail, Facebook, and MySpace.com into a single client.

According to Jeff Hester, who runs instant message community site BigBlueBall.… Read more

When I learned that a company called ChaCha had partnered with the Sundance Film Festival to answer festivalgoer questions via text messaging, I was a little skeptical. I wondered, what makes ChaCha the expert on all things Sundance, and who's going to text in questions when there are festival volunteers, smartphones, laptops, and wireless everywhere?

That was before, however, I found myself stuck in a traffic jam on a crowded shuttle bus, sans laptop and in dire need of a piece of scheduling information. What time was the U2 3D screening and where? That would tell me whether I … Read more