Back in September, I introduced you guys to a great site that provides a web interface to use instant messaging clients called Meebo.com. The company was founded by one of my GSB classmates, Seth S., who actually left the GSB back during Fall quarter to work on Meebo fulltime. A lot of people doubted his choice, but something told me that he was onto something good. Well, almost a year later, Meebo has become a huge success and I couldn’t be prouder to know that one of my friends took such a leap and was able to do it up big.

I’m bringing all of this up because Seth and his team at Meebo have come up with a new offering that is one of the coolest functions that I’ve seen on the Web in years. Their new service, called the MeeboMe Widget, can be found at this link and brings instant messaging functionality to any website. The MeeboMe Widget works by loading a Meebo window on your website and allowing people who visit the site to chat with you if you’re logged on to Meebo.com. Take a look to the right of the screen and you’ll see an example of the window right below the “Clear Admit Best of Blogging” logo. With this feature, I’ll now be able to chat with readers in real time and see if anyone is reading this blog at any given time. On my end, everyone would show up as an anonymous user unless you enter a nickname in the Widget itself, so don’t worry about me figuring out who you are unless you’d want me to. According to Seth, the MeeboMe Widget can be used on any type of site as long as you have access to the HTML source code to imbed the Meebo code. So, if you’ve got a MySpace page, personal website, or even a business site, you can chat directly with your visitors in real-time. Wow, Meebo has something special on their hands with this one.