our story
Meebo's co-founders, Sandy, Seth, and Elaine, were working on side projects for about two years before creating the current meebo.com. During this time, they met weekly to gauge progress and figure out a direction for Meebo. Seth, the business guru, even learned HTML!
In the spring of 2005, Sandy noted her frustration with having to remember 13(!) different screen names that she used at home, work, her friends' places, the Apple store, the library, and that sketchy internet café on the corner. So they started playing around with Ajax IM as an engineering challenge, even though every blog they read said it was impossible, and quickly became addicted. They were soon taking vacation days from their normal, paying jobs to work on what would one day become Meebo.
Meebo launched in September 2005. Andrea, Jian, and Simon were among the first to join Meebo as we moved from Elaine's apartment to a small loft in Palo Alto. We began translations, and the Meebo community helped us go international with 27 languages nearly overnight! Later we introduced Meebo Me, Meebo Map, Meebo Rooms, and the Firefox extension, we are now opening up to developers with the Meebo Platform, and there's even more to come. Whew!
We moved to Castro Street in Mountain View when we outgrew our loft, and now we're a couple dozen folks who appreciate a little bit of absurdity and try not to take ourselves too seriously. We've played 2,998 games of four square, have been through 197 finger blasters, scored 31,416 fussball goals, and have hosted 8 Meebo meet-ups on 3 continents. So far, so good!
why the name meebo?
Many of you have asked us what the name Meebo means, where it comes from, and why it's so hard to say "Meebo" without smiling! Unfortunately for those who were expecting some sort of juicy story, Meebo is no secret acronym or inside joke. As far as we know, it doesn't translate to anything. (Email us if you know otherwise. Apparently there is a Mouse Exonic Evidence Based Oligonucleotide (MEEBO), but that's totally unrelated.)
Sandy, Seth, and Elaine were eating lunch at CPK one afternoon, and while waiting for their appetizers, they thought it'd be fun to do a brain dump of possible product name ideas.
They wrote down all the possible names they could think of on a napkin. Two syllables were a requirement and Elaine leaned heavily towards names that started with the letter "M." It had to have no prior association and the spelling had to be easy enough so that if you heard it, you could spell it.
They came up with about fifty before starting to repeat themselves (the napkin got kind of inky by that point). The waitress was also giving them looks because by then, they'd started playing enunciation games and arguing over who had better spelling skills. Driving back home, they entered all fifty names, one by one, into a browser and eliminated all but something like five, because the rest were taken. After playing with variations on the few remaining, they picked Meebo and voilà!