Open Social and meebo

Last week Google launched Open Social together with a slew of Social Networks and Social Application developers. Are you holding your breath to see how this takes off? Creating platforms is the name of the game. meebo recently launched their own platform to integrate third party applications inside meebo. One of the fascinating partners with meebo is Tokbox. Tokbox provides flash-based video mail and video calling. The potential to provide cross-platform video calling is a compelling offering and one that none of the major desktop IM players are addressing. Yahoo and AOL can video between PC and Mac platforms but it is not possible to video beween services. If Tokbox cracks this challenge they will have a hit on their hands. On the Open Social front I am waiting to see if meebo is going to join Open Social. The ability to provide IM between social networks in a seamless manner, together with TokBox providing video chat, could be just the boost Open Social needs. meebo is a compelling platform, their user stats are impressive with growth in user numbers continuing to grow and the average daily stay of each user is lengthy. Of course meebo has an opportunity to flip the information flow with Open Social and this may be an attractive route to take. An increasing number of companies are blocking traffic to the major social networks like MySpace and Facebook. meebo is not typically blocked, may be because it still flies under the radar in comparison to the popular social network sites. However, if these sites are blocked but could be accessed through the application platform that meebo has built this could make meebo an even more significant player. So meebo - are we going to see support for Open Social and the delivery of MySpace and other Social Network data inside meebo?