Google acquires Wavii for £18m but retires the Meebo Bar

Google has acquired news stream service Wavii for an estimated £18 million, but announced it will retire the Meebo Bar publishing tool.

Wavii

Launched last year, Wavii offers customised news feed to users, summarising news stories, tweets and blogs related to their interests. It can process up to 1,000 articles per minute and summarise the significant information to the user via a personalised news feed.

Created by engineers previously employed by Amazon and Microsoft, Wavii offers services via the web or as a smartphone app and is closely integrated with Facebook. However, it has been reported that may change since the social network competes against Google+.

Adrian Aoun, Wavii’s CEO, said: “You probably know us best for our app that takes the deluge of information streaming across the web and

condenses it into fast, fun updates. While we won’t continue to offer this particular service, we’ll be using our natural language research at Google in ways that may be useful to millions of people around the world.”

The Meebo Bar

Google has also announced it will be bidding goodbye to the Meebo Bar in order to focus on other projects, such as Google+ Sign-In and plug-ins. The Meebo Bar will be retired effective June 6.

Founded in 2005, Meebo was acquired by Google last June for around $100 million.

However, Meebo’s features, including Meebo Messenger, Sharing on Meebo, MeeboMe, and all of its mobile apps, were largely dismantled after the acquisition, but the Meebo Bar made a reappearance in December, with Google+ sharing options. 

After June 6, the Meebo Bar will stop loading on sites and Google has recommended developers remove the inactive code as part of a ‘general code housekeeping task’.

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