Mashable Drops Meebo Toolbar

Mashable is one of the most popular social media and technology blogs on the web, and I visit their site multiple times throughout the day.  This morning, when I visited Mashable, I noticed there was something missing – and that was the Meebo toolbar and sharing integration.  You may remember what I’m talking about – it was the toolbar along the bottom with the small add in the lower left hand corner.  But Meebo was also the platform that allowed you to drag and drop images to sites like Facebook and Yahoo.  I actually use Meebo here on this site (see bottom toolbar and drag and drop photos.)  But today, I no longer see the Meebo integration on Mashable.

I wonder what happened, and why Mashable decided to drop Meebo?  When I first started using Meebo you had to actually submit your site for approval to be part of the revenue sharing program.  But about a month or so ago, Meebo opened up their platform to anyone who wants to add the Meebo toolbar.

Perhaps that is why Mashable decided to leave Meebo – they went mainstream, and started becoming too “average” with their products.

If I had to guess, I would say that Mashable dropped Meebo because of the new focus that Google is putting on site speed.  And one of the best ways to speed up the loading time of your site is to decrease HTML instances – and Meebo has a lot of HTML instances upon pages loading.  So by getting rid of Meebo, you are in essence increasing the speed of your site – makes sense to me!

I have the email address to one of the developers at Meebo.  I will contact him today to see if I can’t get anymore insight into Mashable dropping Meebo.