The meebo Games Platform: it’s gonna happen cuz it’s gotta happen (hopefully)

Platforms are great. Everybody and their Mom are making one. Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo, Tagged, Orkut/Google… etc. Of course you need scale and to provide a business opportunity to developers to make it work. The result thus far has been a lot of random fun app’s. Add favorite friends, quotes, tic tac toe, throw sheep at people. That’s good. Games are most fun of all and go viral because they promote interaction amongst users. Throw a sheep, then the person does something back. Casual games online are really popular because of interaction. But that’s real time. A platform needs “presence” to really unlock value in developer games. That is, users know what other users are online. Meebo can do that. They have millions of users IM’ing back and forth and it’s accepted practice to share your presence with friends. Meebo’s still growing fast. Imagine the top 100 casual games get attached to meebo. Say you use meebo. You’ll want to invite your friends to play chess/tic tac toe/checkers/whatever. So you invite them, and they join meebo. The result? Tons of people get exposed to meebo who never before heard of it. Switching cost is zero because IM’ing is IM’ing, plus meebo is a sweet product by itself. Do a deal with AOL to allow sending mass invites to people via IM (it’s been done before, so follow in those footsteps). The result is a massive community of game developers and tons of people playing highly engaging casual games. Monetization of that is a topic for another post. The point is you amass a huge number of users who become really sticky because the games are built on the meebo platform. The switching cost from meebo back to regular AIM is huge because you can’t play games. Now we’re talking about some sustainability, some long-term value!

 

Thanks for reading. I’m trying to make my posts brief and with a focus on one point. Otherwise the post can easily become confusing and ideas trip over themselves. That makes them easier to write, and hopefully easier/more enjoyable to read. To be sure, the point of this post was meebo can get a ton more users by making a game platform. (By the way, Facebook should do the same thing with presence to promote games. Of course say the Poker app does that, but there’s probably more to do.) What’s your feedback? If you write something thoughtful, I’ll definitely post my comments back. Thanks, tell your friends, sign up for my RSS feed, and keep coming back!

 

Posts that reference meebo but don’t speak about the potential for a meebo platform (will someone pleases drive this conversation?):

http://mashable.com/2007/08/19/meebo-sponsors/

http://mashable.com/2007/05/27/meebo-facebook/

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/09/11/meebo-adds-file-transfer-to-web-im/