Month: November 2010

The web has worked its way into most of our lives to such an extent that it’s easy to take it for granted, and to forget what an incredible resource it is, or the powerful things that it allows us to do as a society. But Sir Tim Berners-Lee — the man who created the web 20 years ago next month, on his desktop computer in Geneva — says that there are threats to the freedom of the web all around us, and that we need to fight them in the same way we fight to protect our freedoms and rights in the so-called real world.

Where are those online threats coming from? Berners-Lee doesn’t mention anyone by name, but he does say that “large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web,” in what appears to be a clear reference to Facebook’s walled-garden approach to sharing things like the email addresses of its users. The other potential threats, he says, include wireless Internet providers who are “being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals,” and also governments — totalitarian and democratic alike — who are “monitoring people’s online habits [and] endangering important human rights.”

The father of the web even takes what appears to be a thinly-veiled shot at Apple, saying that if the trends he is describing towards more closed environments on the web are not checked, “we could lose the freedom to connect with whichever Web sites we want [and] the ill effects could extend to smartphones and pads, which are also portals to the extensive information that the Web provides.”

In some ways, Berners-Lee’s list of threats to the open web sound very much like the recent Wired magazine piece entitled “The Web is Dead,” which also looked at the rise of apps and the move towards AOL-style walled gardens. Wired’s piece got some criticism from many (including me) because it seemed to be overly negative, especially since much of what the magazine described as non-web — smartphone apps and so on — still depends on web protocols, even if they are hidden from view. But Berners-Lee echoes Wired’s concerns about large players controlling access to information in various ways.

Others have raised similar warning flags about potential threats to the open web from giant information quasi-monopolies such as Google, Facebook and Apple — including Tim Wu, the Columbia University law professor who coined the term “net neutrality,” and warns in his recent book “The Master Switch” that instead of a monument to the open market, the Internet is starting to look “like a Monopoly board,” and that the Internet may even tend to favor monopolies.

It should be noted, however, that not everyone agrees that Google or Facebook are actually monopolies in any kind of legal sense, although they are definitely dominant players. And while Google is clearly a web giant, it’s worth remembering that Yahoo and AOL were once web giants too, and they are shadows of their former selves now, displaced by completely new players. Even Facebook, which is now seen as one of the companies to be afraid of, is threatened in many ways by Twitter — a startup that barely even existed a few years ago and is now reportedly valued at close to $3 billion.

That said, it is worth being reminded that large players often see it as being in their interests to restrict the freedom of their users, and that — as Berners-Lee warns in his Scientific American piece — this can chip away at the web’s core principles, which he says revolve around “a profound concept: that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere.” If that becomes circumscribed by the companies controlling the flow of that information, he says, “the Web could be broken into fragmented islands.” Why should we care about these potential incursions into the open web? Berners-Lee says:

Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium. It brings principles established in the U.S. Constitution, the British Magna Carta and other important documents into the network age: freedom from being snooped on, filtered, censored and disconnected.

More critical to free speech than any other medium? That is a strong claim — but there is certainly an argument to be made that the web fits that definition. The ability to send information to anyone, to link to content wherever it exists, and to publish almost instantly seems so commonplace now that we forget how important it is, in almost exactly the same way that democracy itself is important. It’s good to be reminded of that, and Tim Berners-Lee is certainly the one who is best equipped to do so.

Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to keep fighting the inevitable. In the case of Myspace, that means admitting the unpleasant — but equally undeniable — fact that it has lost the social-networking race to Facebook. The News Corp. subsidiary has been doing that gradually over the past few months, and the latest move in that direction came today, with the launch of a new feature that Myspace CEO Mike Jones called “Mashup with Facebook,” which allows users to import their Facebook profile, favorites and content into Myspace.

Jones said that the mashup feature would let Myspace members “create a personalized stream of entertainment content” based on their profile and favorites from Facebook, and that the launch was part of the network’s goal to be the web’s “leading entertainment destination.”

As a number of outlets have already reported, Facebook login integration with Myspace has been available for some time now (at least since yesterday), allowing new users to signup by using their Facebook profile in the same way many others do. Myspace also launched something called “sync with Facebook” in August, which allows users to connect their status updates and other activity with their Facebook profile or pages, and to push content from Myspace to the larger social network. Jones said Myspace was also planning to add Facebook “like” buttons to the site soon.

Dan Rose — Facebook’s VP of partnerships and platform marketing — pointed out during the news conference that thousands of other websites have already integrated with Facebook’s platform. But Myspace isn’t just any other service: it is the company that media kingpin Rupert Murdoch paid $580 million for in **, convinced that buying what was then the leading social network was the route to social-media riches for News Corp. Instead, traffic to the site has plummeted, despite refocusing on music and a recent heavily promoted redesign.

Myspace CEO Mike Jones reportedly told The Telegraph at the Monaco Media Forum last week that Myspace has effectively given up the social-networking race, and now sees itself as a “social entertainment destination” (Om wrote the social network’s obituary in February, after the departure of former CEO Owen Van Natta). Jones, meanwhile, said during the press call that he is excited about Myspace’s refocusing as an entertainment destination, and that he sees the new feature as “complementary” to Facebook.

The big question, of course, is whether this integration will matter or not. There may well be users who are devoted to Myspace who will use the connection with Facebook to pull their profile info and other content onto their Myspace page and maintain two separate social networking identities, but it seems more likely that this will accelerate Myspace’s slide. And it may be just the first step in accelerating the property’s ejection from News Corp. as well: in a recent conference call about News Corp.’s financial results, president Chase Carey said the site’s lifespan was being “measured in months, not years.”

It didn’t get as much attention as his comments about generating revenue and fighting with Facebook, but to me one of the most interesting things that former Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams said during his interview at the Web 2.0 Summit on Wednesday was his comment about how Twitter “lowers the barriers to publishing almost as far as they can go.” Williams said that the impact of doing this is only beginning to be felt, and I think he is absolutely right.

The answer came in response to a question from the audience about how Twitter empowers people to publish and effectively act as journalists, and Williams said that lowering the barriers of entry into publishing is something he has worked on for most of his career (since he also founded one of the leading early blog-publishing platforms), and that he has done so based on his belief that “the open exchange of information has a positive effect on the world.” In a nutshell, Williams said, this is what the Internet as a whole allows us to do, and society is still trying to figure out all the repercussions that stem from “everyone having a voice.”

It’s not just Twitter that is empowering this, obviously — it’s everything from YouTube and handheld video cameras to powerful cellphone cameras, from blog platforms and Tumblr to self-publishing via the Kindle and other e-book platforms. It’s an explosion of voices, and Twitter is at the center of it only because it makes “micro-blogging” so easy and the network has grown so huge that a tweet can be passed around the world and back before newspaper reporters are even getting their shoes on.

Yes, there is a lot of noise on Twitter, as Andrew Keen seems to argue in his recent debate with David Weinberger, but the point is that Twitter provides a firehose of both meaningful and non-meaningful data, in tiny bite-size pieces, and it is up to you to figure out how to deal with it. That has led to some interesting tools aimed at “curation” — that is, pulling those fragments of information and conversation back together and making sense of them — such as Storify (built by former AP correspondent Burt Herman) and Curated.by and other services that allow you to pull together various threads from Twitter.

But on an even deeper level, there is a big opportunity to use that flood of 100 million tweets a day as the foundation for trend-filtering and other tools. Some startups have focused on how to use this to track social mentions of companies or products, such as Sysomos and Radian6, while others — such as Nick Hamstead’s DataSift and Tweetbeat, which was built by the analytical brains behind Kosmix — are trying to filter all that data and find out what the world is talking about in real-time. There is huge potential there not just for companies but for journalism.

As Ken Doctor notes in a piece at the Nieman Journalism Lab, using Facebook’s new social inbox as the metaphor, news is everywhere now — it comes to us in all kinds of different forms and different ways, and obviously Twitter is one of those. Most traditional news organizations have not figured out how to use those tools effectively yet, or how to take advantage of this transformation of the news industry, but some are trying. At its best, during events such as the subway bombing in London or the uprisings in Iran, Twitter allows for the true “crowdsourcing” of journalism, and that is a very, very powerful tool for the pursuit of truth, broadly speaking.

It’s true — as Malcolm Gladwell and others have argued — that Twitter has not saved Iran, or stopped China from cracking down on its citizens, or dozens of other things that other technologies have also not accomplished. But the fact that people in repressive countries can communicate with others relatively quickly and easily, even if those messages do get them imprisoned, is a powerful thing. It’s not clear whether she has done so yet, but Burmese freedom fighter Aung San Suu Kyi said that if and when she was released from house arrest after 20 years (which she has been), she wanted to get a Twitter account so she could communicate with her supporters.

Many people are still focused on Twitter as a tool for promoting movies or TV shows, or see it as a toy that geeks and their friends play with to amuse themselves. But the real power in what Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone created (and what Ev Williams later financed and built into a company) could well be that it is the simplest, the easiest and arguably one of the most efficient forms of mass publishing — or at least micro-publishing — ever invented. And as Williams himself suggested, we are still trying to figure out the full ramifications of that. It is a good problem to have.

NewsTrust, a non-profit startup aimed at improving the credibility of media, spent a week earlier this year on an experiment it called Truthsquad — a project that tried to “crowdsource” fact-checking, and specifically some of the major statements made by public figures and special-interest groups about issues such as health care. NewsTrust founder Fabrice Florin has released some of the results from that experiment, saying the project was a success and that NewsTrust and its partners plan to expand the effort over the next year.

Among the things that NewsTrust learned, according to Florin:

• Game mechanics work: NewsTrust says the Truthsquad experiment generated twice as much participation as some of its other pilots in 2010. Users gave ten times more answers per quote than reviews per story, over half the participants read linked stories, and a third answered a Truthsquad quote. Florin said the high level of engagement was partly due to the game-like quality of the user experience, which started by inviting people to guess whether a statement was true or false.
• Pros and amateurs can work together: Truthsquad was a collaboration with advisors and journalists from the Poynter Institute and FactCheck.org, and Florin said that having experienced professionals judge results and help users with the fact-checking avoided “some of the pitfalls of pure crowdsourcing initiatives, which can turn into mob scenes — particularly around politically charged issues.” Amateurs learned valuable skills, he said, and some community members posted links that were “critical to reaching our verdicts.”
• Crowdsourcing takes effort: Florin said that despite high levels of participation, Truthsquad “didn’t get as many useful links and reviews from our community as we had hoped,” and as a result, the startup’s editorial team had to do a lot of work researching the evidence behind the statements they were checking, making the whole effort more labor-intensive than the group expected. Florin said that in the future, NewsTrust is going to experiment with more visible rewards for input, such as badges, redeemable credits of some kind and possibly even prizes.

Truthsquad isn’t the only attempt to bring a crowdsourced element to media fact-checking: MediaBugs, founded by former Salon editor Scott Rosenberg, is another fact-checking oriented site that is funded by a Knight News Challenge grant and recently announced it has moved out of beta and is going national. The startup has a widget that allows publishers to integrate crowd or reader-driven fact-checking into their websites, and is hoping to find other ways to distribute its services, rather than making people go to the MediaBugs site.

Like most blog-focused sites, we get plenty of fact-checking from our readers, through the comments on our posts — and it is a critical part of what we do (unfortunately, we are not perfect). Many traditional publishers, however, don’t get as much as they probably need, and both MediaBugs and NewsTrust are interesting efforts in that direction.

NewsTrust, meanwhile, says it is hoping to fact-check one public statement a day for the next year using Truthsquad. Florin says he also wants to help train users and readers in how to fact-check statements by politicians and others in the media, using the skills of the startup’s advisors, including the Poynter Institute and FactCheck.org. That’s something that we could probably all benefit from. If you want to participate, you can sign-up here.

Twitter co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams admits that the company “screwed up” its relationship with third-party developers in the past, and says that happened mostly because the startup didn’t originally plan to become a platform company. Now that it is actually trying to be a platform, Williams says that Twitter will continue to try and provide opportunities for developers, but isn’t ruling out moving into any Twitter-related service or feature area, with the exception of gaming.

Williams, who recently stepped down as CEO and was replaced by former chief operating officer Dick Costolo, told the crowd at the Web 2.0 Summit in ** that Twitter originally released an API — which allows developers to integrate their apps and services with the network — because “we thought it would be neat,” and lots of other web companies had them. But as the company grew, he said to interviewer John Battelle, it realized that it needed to fill some of the holes in its feature set, and that led to the purchase of Tweetie and triggered some bad feeling in the developer community.

Twitter has continued adding features, Williams said, and plans to keep on doing so regardless of whether other companies are already providing services or apps that have those features. For example, Twitter launched an analytics-focused service today, which provides data from the 100 million or so tweets that are published on the network every day to a small group of partners. But the former CEO said that the company wants to ensure that the platform it is building also has plenty of opportunities for outside companies and startups.

Williams also said that the demand for the company’s ad-related services — such as “promoted tweets” and “promoted trends” — has been far greater than the startup has been able to satisfy, and that most of the advertisers who have tried these features have come back again. These monetization efforts have been much more successful than Twitter initially expected. The company also gets revenue from deals it signed with Microsoft, Google and Yahoo to provide the full Twitter “firehose” of data for their search engines, and today announced a similar deal to provide half of the firehose to Gnip, a company that will be reselling the data to outside analytics providers.

Battelle asked the Twitter founder about rumors that Russian holding company Mail.ru might be leading a new ** financing round that would value the company at more than $3 billion, but Williams refused to comment, saying only that Twitter “has plenty of money in the bank” already.

Google has launched a local recommendations service with a rather unusual name, and a huge disadvantage: it’s called Google Hotpot — presumably a reference to the traditional Chinese “hotpot” or communal dining experience — and the disadvantage (apart from the weird name) is that it is coming late to a market that Yelp already dominates. Google’s effort is interesting in some ways, and it has some strengths that others may not have because it is part of a giant search company, but the reality is that the odds are stacked against it.

To Google’s credit, the new feature is relatively simple to get into: you log in, search for a place and theme (i.e., restaurants, nightclubs, etc.) and it presents you with a number of suggestions, which you can then rate — and you can see the ratings of others. Once you have rated 5 places, you get Google’s attempt at personalized recommendations, which based on my initial use are pretty predictable. The idea, though, is that over time it will learn from you, and also that your friends will start using it and their recommendations will influence your choices as well (Hunch is also experimenting with local recommendations).

Coincidentally, I recently looked at a very similar service — right down to the “flash-card” style interface that Google also uses — called In The Mo, which recently launched out of beta. Like HotPot, you rate a certain number of locations and then you start to get personalized recommendations (to be fair, In The Mo also features video of local attractions, which makes it a bit different). The biggest problem for both this new startup and HotPot is simple: at the moment, they are ghost-towns.

Obviously, every socially-based service is going to be like that to begin with, but how many make the leap from that status to viral success? Not many. And just because Google is a giant web company doesn’t make its odds any higher. If anything, it makes them lower.

To be blunt, Google doesn’t have a fantastic track record with this kind of social app. There’s the ill-fated Wave and its cousin Buzz, of course, but even in the geo-location and recommendation area Google hasn’t really been able to come up with something magical: Latitude, which could have been Foursquare — particularly after Google bought Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley’s previous location-based startup, Dodgeball — doesn’t seem to get used much (at least not by anyone I know) and Google’s user reviews via its Place pages don’t seem to have gotten much traction so far either (they are now incorporated into HotPot as well).

About the only thing Google has going for it is that it can pull data from your search history (if you have that turned on) as well as your Latitude history (if you use it) and potentially make suggestions that are better than the run-of-the-mill ideas you will find via Yelp or some other local recommendation app. But these still aren’t going to be recommendations from your friends, which likely have the most power — Google HotPot isn’t going to be able to do that until your friends start using it, or until it offers some kind of connection with Facebook (which seems pretty unlikely). That still gives Facebook a leg up in terms of getting traction for such a service once it rolls out recommendations via Facebook Places.

When it gets right down to it, Google doesn’t have either of the things that Yelp or Facebook have when it comes to competing in this space: Yelp has built up a substantial database of user reviews, which gives it the depth that is going to take Google a long time to reproduce, and Facebook has the social graphs of 500 million users, which means it has the network effect and the personal aspect that is also going to be difficult for Google to reproduce.

If there was a bet on whether HotPot would be more like Google Maps (i.e., a big success) or more like Buzz, I would put my money on the latter.

Ever since the news hit that Newsweek’s new owner is combining the publication with Tina Brown’s web-based media outlet The Daily Beast, there has been a frenzy of criticism over the decision to kill Newsweek’s website and redirect readers to The Daily Beast site instead. Felix Salmon of Reuters, for example, called it “bizarre,” and Newsweek.com staffers quickly set up a Tumblr blog to complain about the move, which they said was a result of senior managers who “deep down, don’t understand the web.” But is killing Newsweek.com such a bad idea? Not necessarily.

The main reason that most critics have given for keeping Newsweek.com — apart from the fact that lots of talented people have worked hard to build it, as the Tumblr blog argues — is that it gets a lot more visitors than The Daily Beast does. According to Quantcast, Newsweek’s site gets about 7 million unique visitors a month compared with about 4 million for The Daily Beast. However, as noted in a piece at Ad Age, according to the same survey the visitors to Tina Brown’s site return more frequently and stay longer when they are there. Those are important metrics when it comes to reaching (and keeping) advertisers.

This is not scientific by any means, but while I have only visited The Daily Beast a couple of dozen times since it launched, that is still about 25 more visits than I have ever made to Newsweek.com — nor am I ever likely to go there. I realize that I am not the typical online media consumer, but there is an argument to be made that when it comes to an online audience, the Newsweek brand name may actually have a negative connotation rather than a positive one. And the site won’t be disappearing entirely: Tina Brown says it will live on under its own banner, and links will obviously be redirected so that past content doesn’t disappear.

In many ways, Newsweek is facing the same kinds of wrenching decisions that other traditional media entities are — such as the New York Times, which is reorganizing its newsroom even as it prepares to launch a paywall in an attempt to produce digital revenues and/or shore up its print circulation (lacklustre numbers from News Corp.’s recently launched paywall notwithstanding). How much emphasis will be placed on the web as opposed to print? The Washington Post, which also recently merged its newsrooms, has been criticized by many because the “printies have won.” Will the print side dominate at the NYT as well?

The reality is that Newsweek is a failing brand, with a failing business model — otherwise it would not have had to put itself on the block and be sold for the equivalent of $1 U.S (plus the assumption of $40-million in debt). So why keep a website that is shackled to that fading name? Nostalgia? It’s true that the Daily Beast website is smaller, and that the startup is also rumored to be losing money. But at least it has been growing rather than shrinking, and regardless of Tina Brown’s print-based past, the Beast has a reputation as a smart web operator, not unlike the Huffington Post. Better to ride that pony than try to breathe life into another faded old-media brand.

The New York Times is a lot better off than Newsweek, obviously, but it has to make a similar choice: embrace the web, and all that entails, or allow the declining print side of the business to remain at the forefront and control the decision-making process? The fact that the newspaper is still considering a paywall (albeit one with openings to allow for social media, apparently) seems more like a defensive move than anything else. At least Newsweek’s new owner is thinking differently.

After more than two years worth of apps for the iPhone, not to mention other handsets like the Android, there are very few applications that come as a complete surprise. But one app I looked at recently definitely fell into that category — if only because it has been installed close to 10 million times, and has millions of regular and devoted users, but hardly anyone in the tech press ever writes about it. It’s called YouVersion, but it is better known simply as “the Bible app.”

Yes, the Bible has an app. No, it was not delivered to anyone on a mountain, and there were no burning bushes involved. And yes, it is close to 10 million installs, according to Bobby Gruenewald — the pastor at Lifechurch.tv, a high-tech church based in Oklahoma and the brains behind the Bible app. Gruenewald was involved in the tech industry before he joined the church (he had a web-hosting company in the 1990s that he eventually sold) so the idea of using the web and mobile to help people connect with the Bible seemed like a natural, he says.

The app provides an easy-to-read interface to the Bible (obviously) in more than 40 different versions and 22 different languages, but has social features and other interesting functions built in as well: users can share their favorite passages by posting them to their Facebook wall or sharing them on Twitter, and Gruenewald says there have been half a million such tweets over the past year. Users can also choose from a number of pre-set reading plans (read the New Testament in six weeks, etc.) and then track and share their progress much like runners do with Runkeeper.

It started with a website in 2007, where anyone who was interested could find bible passages and reading plans, and then was followed by a mobile version of the site in 2008 that looked better on smartphones. When Apple launched the app store for the iPhone, the church had a simple version of its app available the first day, and since then there have been repeated iterations — and the interest in the app continues to increase at a fairly rapid rate: Gruenewald says YouVersion is seeing about a million installs a month (many of which, not surprisingly, happen on Sunday).

The app also allows pastors and priests to put together passages with their notes, links to content, and even polls that users can take on various issues — as well as an interactive feature that allows them to solicit names of parishioners that should be prayed for. And the app uses geo-location to show users if a nearby church has a lesson plan or other content available so they can download it. New features coming include support for text, audio and video notes associated with specific passages, Gruenewald says — and possibly even Foursquare-style badges.

It’s fascinating to see the traditional technology approach of a mainstream app used for something like YouVersion, and how quickly it seems to be taking off — not surprising, perhaps, given the viral effect that seeing another church-goer using the app would have. In terms of the breakdown of users, the pastor says that iOS devices (iPhone and iPad) account for about 5.6 million of the installations, while Android and BlackBerry are more or less evenly matched at about 2.4 million — although the number of Android users is growing quickly, he says

With the launch of the heavily-financed Path app late last night, and the explosion of interest in other similar apps such as Instagram and PicPlz, it seems the world is awash in photo-sharing services. Why? There are some prosaic reasons — better cameras in the iPhone and other smartphones, for example, and the lack of usable (or at least appealing) offerings from established photo-sharing players such as Facebook, Flickr and Picasa. But the big reason is probably that photo sharing is a great way to jump-start a broader social network.

That point was made by a series of high-profile venture capitalists in an interesting thread on the question-and-answer site Quora on Sunday night, following the highly-anticipated launch of Path, in response to the question “What explains the explosion in social photosharing entrepreneurial activity?” Several of those who responded noted that the iPhone camera has gotten substantially better — and angel investor Shervin Pishevar, who founded the Social Gaming Network, said we may not have seen anything yet: “Wait till Christmas hits. You thought you saw an explosion in growth so far,” he said, noting that the new iPod Touch, which has a camera, will “throw fuel on the fire.”

But in the answer that got the most votes, Simon Olson — a VC with Draper Fisher Jurvetson in Brazil — said that sharing photos is a core activity that can form the “base activity of the ‘social’ pyramid. Whether you are looking at Facebook or Orkut, etc., it is one of the most popular activities that users engage in on social networks. So, if you are going to start building a new ‘social’ platform, you want to start with one of the most popular activities.” Keith Rabois, chief operating officer at Square, made the same point on Twitter, saying photos are the “key wedge” in creating broader social networks.

The best example of this, of course, is Facebook. One of the things the company did early on — along with poking and other features such as status updates — was make it easy to share photos. For some people, that is one of the biggest reasons they use the site at all, and Facebook is by far the largest photo-hosting site on the Internet (one recent estimate was that more than 3 billion photos are uploaded every month). That, of course, makes it even more embarrassing that Yahoo has never really been able to take advantage of its ownership of Flickr, which was a pioneering photo-sharing service.

It’s no coincidence that both Flickr and Instagram started out being very different services — Flickr was originally an offshoot of an online role-playing game called The Game Neverending, and Instagram started its life as a location-based service called Burbn (which Andreeseen Horowitz invested in, and has since shifted its allegiance to PicPlz) — and then they shifted to doing photos. The interesting thing about Path is that the app has virtually no social features whatsoever: you can’t comment on photos, you can’t click to “like” them, you can’t tag them or share them with others through your other social networks.

Given its ruthless focus on making your circle of friends small and private, it seems likely that Path — which conspicuously calls itself “the private network,” rather than “the private network for photos” — is going after the opposite end of the spectrum from Facebook (where co-founder Dave Morin used to work) and intends to build a more private social graph around photos, rather than the massively public graph that Facebook represents. Whether Instagram and PicPlz, or other apps like DailyBooth, have similarly large ambitions remains to be seen.

You can “check in” to locations in the real world with your phone — now Meebo wants to bring the same idea to the web. The company, which offers a sharing toolbar that lets users connect to social networks while they surf, is launching a new version that allows them to check in to any site that offers the Meebo bar, and to follow other users and see what websites they visit. Available as a browser extension as of Tuesday, the company said the new features will be rolled out to all sites using the toolbar by mid-December.

Meebo’s existing toolbar sits at the bottom of a website, much like other toolbars that can be downloaded and installed by users, but the Meebo bar is added by individual website publishers — including TMZ, Justin.tv and Entertainment Weekly — through a few lines of Javascript. Users can log into or create a Meebo account that connects to their Facebook, Twitter and instant messenger accounts, and then share a link to the site via the toolbar, or even drag and drop individual elements of the page (images, videos, etc.) in order to share them with friends.

Meebo founder and CEO Seth Steinberg says that in talking with users, the company heard that many wanted to know what sites their friends were visiting, but didn’t necessarily get that kind of information from Facebook. “On Facebook, they can see what sites their friends were looking at last night, but not the sites they’re on right now,” he said. So the startup decided to build in a “follow” function, as well as the ability to “check in” and tell others where you are as you surf.

While on a site with the toolbar, users can click and check in at the site, and can also see any of their friends who have also checked in there, and — if they choose to enable it — can share that information with Facebook or Twitter. Steinberg says that after a certain number of visits, users can become VIPs on specific sites, which allows websites to offer them discounts based, in the same way that some retailers using Foursquare or Facebook Places offer return visitors deals on merchandise. Meebo will also be offering sites that don’t use the toolbar a “check in” button.

Meebo has plenty of users who already make use of its cross-platform IM service and web-based messaging. But will users take to another service that wants them to check in somewhere and follow other users, even if they can share that status easily with Facebook and other networks they already use? Steinberg says that the optimistic view of a recent Pew survey — which showed that few people use location-sharing services — is that there is still plenty of room to convince them to do so.

“Check-ins haven’t been done in any kind of meaningful way on the web,” the Meebo founder said. “We think we can truly drive new social discovery through these features.” Steinberg says that Meebo reaches about 190 million unique visitors a month via the more than 8,000 websites that run its toolbar, and almost half of those users are in the U.S., which means the company reaches about a third of U.S. Internet users. How many of them want to check in to the sites they are visiting — and share that information with the world — remains to be seen.