Less than a year after the acquisition, Google kills off the Meebo bar

A moment of silence, please. The Google graveyard has just gained another resident.

Ok, so technically it’s not a Gproduct, but it was the flagship tool that got social startup Meebo noticed by major publishers and advertisers, before it was acquired by Google in June last year. But it seems the Meebo bar is destined for a short life span: the team announced that it would be discontinuing the social media and sharing bar on 6 June, as it shifts its focus to Google+ products.

In a notice on its website, Meebo says that while its mission is still to bring “community, engagement, and revenue to publisher sites”, it intends to focus its resources on Google+ plug ins (which currently include badges and share buttons) and the recently launched sign in option.

Any publishers using the Meebo bar will find that the sharing tool will simply stop loading on their sites in early June, although analytics will be accessible until the end of the month. Before the acquisition, Meebo had more than 100-million monthly users, but a number of its other tools were shuttered after the purchase by Google. The bar remained, although it received a revamp late last year to include Google+ sharing options.

At the time of the acquisition, there was a lot of speculation about whether Google would use some of Meebo’s techniques to monetise Google+. That doesn’t seem to have happened, although Google has been introducing a number of new ways to use Google+ recently, including interactive posts and the sign in option, which is designed to boost engagement and app installs.