Google Shuttering Meebo Bar To Focus On Google+

Google has announced it will retire the Meebo Bar, the last remaining part of its 2012 social network acquisition, on June 6, instead focusing its efforts on fleshing out Google+. Meebo, which Google bought in June last year, offered a combination of chat, social sharing, and integration with Google+ and other networks from the Meebo Bar; Google promptly axed all but the last component just over a month after buying the company.

"As part of the Google team ... we want to best serve mobile and desktop publishers moving forward" the former Meebo team said in a statement. "Therefore, we have decided to focus our resources on initiatives like the recently launched Google+ Sign-In ... and the Google+ plug-ins."

Those publishers still using the Meebo Bar will see it automatically cease loading after June 6, though cutting the relevant code from a site today will remove it instantly. As for the Meebo Bar Dashboard, complete with analytics, that will be available until June 30 as well as exportable as a .csv file for later reference.

However, any changes made on the Dashboard after the official retirement date will have no effect on the bar. Creation of new Meebo Bars has already been disabled.

Google splashed out an estimated $100m for Meebo in 2012, in what was believed at the time to be a grab for the company's site-agnostic chat and discussion system. With Meebo installed, users could initiate chat sessions about any site they visited, with a discrete control bar across the bottom of the screen that was independent of the site itself.

How exactly that technology will be baked into Google+ remains to be seen, though Google's social service has seen text, voice, and video chat functionality built out considerably since it launched.