Meebo, the handy tool used in thousands of workplaces, schools and libraries each day to get around IM filters, just announced that they’ve surpassed 500,000 created user accounts since their launch back in March. For those who don’t know, Meebo is an web-based AJAX tool which combines MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk.
Reaching 500,000 registered users isn’t the only eminent achievement for them, though. They released some other highly interesting statistics as well:
- Meebo is logged into 900,000 times each day, approximately 10 times every second.
- This equates to about 670,000 unique logins (you don’t have to register to login, so we can assume the registrants are dedicated Meebo users, since they chose to do so).
- The average user logs into 1.4 different networks at a time, that’s 1.3 million unique network IDs each day.
- 3.5 million unique individuals log into Meebo each month, and send and receive more than 57,000,000 messages.
- The average user stays on Meebo for around 70 minutes. That’s 122 years every day if you combine each unique.
- Meebo Me, Meebo’s widget service which lets users embed widgets onto their website, blog, or MySpace account, has had over 42,000 unique widgets embedded, which have been seen by more than 6 million people.
I have to say, some of these statistics are quite amazing and represent a fair bit of the mainstream users of Web 2.0. From what I can draw, the majority of the Meebo users are the MySpace generation, aged 15 – 29. They go to schools and colleges, they use IM, who else would need to use a service like Meebo at such frequency, as opposed to say a desktop-based alternative?
Netvibes, an AJAX-based desktop startpage which Meebo can integrate into, released a claim last month that they had over 5 million users. Of course, no one can forget MySpace hitting 100 million users back in August, along with a group of social networking sites that already fall into the 10s of millions.
Meebo’s notable competitors include KoolIM, eBuddy, RadiusIM, and Mabber. Another interesting fact about Meebo is that it is supposedly programmed in C++, a rare choice for such a tool in today’s world. Oh, and congratulations to the 500,000th user, who is now the proud owner of a Meebo t-shirt. Let’s just hope whoever it is isn’t caught wearing it around the school computer lab! 
[tags]Meebo, Web-Based IM, AJAX[/tags]
