Meebo is adding an API to Meebo Rooms, as well as launching what it calls the Meebo Network so partners can share in revenue from advertising.

While Meebo already had an API and offered Meebo Rooms for integration with Facebook applications, this latest option from Meebo lets developers use the Meebo Rooms API for combining applications with the their existing user base. This means that if you run an online community and want to add Meebo chatrooms, your users will be able to seamlessly use their existing usernames and passwords.

As for the ad network, the revenue split for the Meebo Network is 50%, and a licensing option is available for those that would rather have an ad-free chat room. As with many other integrated, media advertising options, Meebo will be testing ad placement within its new network in order to further automate the process with additional features of implementing optimal ad placement for future use.

Meebo has announced five partners for the launch of these two new programs: Piczo, Revision3, RockYou, Social Project and Tagged.

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Hoover’s today launched officially the Hoover’s Connect social network, a very highly engineered social network for businessmen intent on networking and establishing relationships with targeted prospects. The launch announcement comes hand in hand with confirmation of the rumored agreement Hoovers has made to acquire Visible Path, a company responsible for powering Hoover’s Connect in it’s beta last year.

Visible Path is a service that provides connections for businesses, mapping a company’s social graphs. Or, as Kristen put it in her review last month, “a custom LinkedIn for just your company, and the peripheral contacts outside of the company that are made through individual connections.”

Visible Path scans desktop applications like Outlook, and keeps an up-to-date graph those in your immediate network, detailing who you’re strongest and most numerous connections are. Hoovers Connect takes the functionality of Visible Path and adds to it the layers of privacy protection they’ve been working on in the system allowing the users to have full control over who to invite into their network and to whom they want to grant others access within their network. Users have the option to either stay cloaked or identify themselves.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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John Oates is in the house! As a surprise piece of iVideoSongs‘ DEMO demo, the team brought out John Oates to show how the service will work. Sorta. I mean, iVideoSongs won’t be able to deliver John Oates in person for guitar lessons, but the video lessons made available on iVideoSongs will come from directly from the musicians that made them famous.

The goal here is to teach you how to play music accurately, while still giving you the control over your music lessons. iVideoSongs is working with the content owners (i.e. record labels) to get DRM-free benefits that can be extended to the users. That means you can play lessons on your computer, your iPod, or wherever. Lessons can be purchased for about $4.99.

The overall setup of iVideoSongs appears to be quite similar to NowPlayIt, with less buying options and a more uniform approach to selling music lessons on the web, in video format. As we’ve seen with Guitar World and the development it’s been working on with its new Tabs feature, the shift is not only affecting the way in which users interact with the music they love, but how music education is experienced overall.

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According to TheAlarmClock, Treedia Labs is about to wrap up $5 million in round B funding. If the name doesn’t ring any immediate bells, don’t worry, they’re better known as podcast.com and videocast.com. Both systems are platforms developed to deliver audio and video via RSS feeds to users.

The destination sites don’t seem as much a priority, but they are both designed to help people get their casts out to more people, help users find them and also teach people how to start creating both forms of media.

No word on who is behind the funding or what it will be used for, but it’s not difficult to imagine it will be used to further development of their platforms, and given the current climate of rich media, build advertising relationships and sales staff.

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Collaboration is all around us, and it’s becoming a standard feature for many web apps that are launching these days, especially in the business realm. KonoLive is another tool that’s hoping to make collaboration for teams a simpler process, and it’s launching at DEMO today. Utilizing a tool that very much resembles an instant messaging client, KonoLive is leveraging Adobe AIR to provide a connected tool that users can take advantage of, working both online and off in order to share their work with each other.

This acts as a unified collaboration space, where documents, web pages and media files can be exchanged amongst users. From a higher level, this appears to be very much like an AIM tool, or even the soon-to-be dead TubesNow, with a desktop application that enables you to share items with various team members.

So is KonoLive merely borrowing from the social media-sharing tools that have already been implanted into various communication platforms like instant messengers? While that appears to be somewhat of an anchor point for KonoLive, that doesn’t really speak to the collaboration end of things: for true collaboration users would need features like tagging options, commenting, versions, etc. To this end, KonoLive has these features, along with digital signatures, voting, and more stuff on the way. Place these features into a live media-sharing tool, and now there’s a new way to look at productivity.

I haven’t had much opportunity to delve very deep into KonoLive, but from the looks of it, this tool probably won’t be for everybody (not yet, at least). Here at Mashable, our primary way of communication is across email and instant messengers. We share a lot of releases from companies, websites we come across, and discuss larger issues surrounding the topics of our professional industry.

So having the ability to tack on sharing options to the existing mainframe of our every day medium of conversation would make a lot of sense for the Mashable team, but the adoption rate for mainstream and even business use is likely to be a bit slower to catch on. The options such as those offered in KonoLive often work best when introduced as an extension to existing means of communication.

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I’ll let you cue the M*A*S*H theme song in your head while we talk about the string of suicides that took place this week in the United Kingdom. There really are few things more sad or bizarre than a string of youth suicides - aside from the way the press and political organizations in the area surrounding the events seem to be reacting. Instead of profiling a number of different crime incidents, this week, we’ll instead be showcasing a number of different media and political reactions to the event.

How is it a social media issue? Well, as with most new-fangled technologies generally misunderstood by older generations, Bebo, MySpace and Facebook are all being blamed for a string of seven suicides that have taken place in the Bridgend, South Wales area.

Most of the news sites that have detailed the story are quite sparse, and generally go something along the lines of the description found here in this AllHeadlineNews write-up:

Officials said Wednesday that police officers were now trying to uncover details regarding the series of suicides in a Welsh town which were believed to be linked to an internet online network.

The death of a 17-year-old teenage girl heightened the alert of police because in over a year, there have been six young men who took their own lives in the area.

Investigators were now looking at the possibility linking the suicides to an online internet social site Bebo, where the tag says, “Bebo is a social media network where friends share their lives and explore great entertainment.”

Bridgend MP Madeleine Moon said suicides may have been motivated due teenagers’ desire to have their names on online memorial pages of a big social network that millions of teenagers can view.

The most detailed write-up I’ve seen so far came from the British tabloid the Sun, where they explained the connections between each suicide victim over the last 12 months:

Latest to die was student Natasha Randall, 17, web name Wildchild. She was found hanging in her bedroom last week. Within 24 hours two 15-year-old friends also attempted suicide. One tried to hang herself but was saved in the nick of time by her family. She is still on a life support machine. The other survived after trying to slash her wrists and is now back home with her family.

Although they did not all know each other, several had pages on the networking site Bebo — and since their deaths friends have set up memorial sites where they can post messages.

Cops are concerned that people who chat on sites like Bebo think it is “cool” to have an internet memorial site — and may kill themselves to achieve prestige and even hero-worship. Officers have seized Natasha’s PC, which she spent hours on, to look for a “suicide chain” linking victims. Natasha posted a farewell message to Liam Clarke, 20, the fifth to die.

It says: “R.I.P Clarky boy!! gonna miss ya! always remember the gd times! love ya x.” Liam was found hanging in a park on December 27. He was a pal of Thomas Davies, 20, the third to die. He hanged himself in woods last February.

Thomas had bought a suit two days earlier to attend the funeral of his friend David Dilling, 19, who hanged himself the same month. Police are also linking the deaths of Dale Crole, 18, the first youngster to die, and Zac Barnes, 17. Dale was found hanging in a disused warehouse at nearby Porthcawl in January 2007. He had been missing for four months. Zac was hanged from a washing line at a block of flats in August last year. He was a pal of Thomas.

The sixth victim was Gareth Morgan, 27. He was found hanged in the bedroom of his Bridgend home two weeks ago.

As someone who reads news from a social media/social networking news site regularly, and someone who is thus fairly tech savvy, you’re likely thinking the same thing I am. Words like ’sensationalistic,’ ‘clueless,’ and ‘incorrect’ probably spring to mind as you’re trying to fathom why someone would try to pin this whole thing on a social network. Before I illustrate and flesh out in words on a screen what you’re likely already thinking, let me pile on a statement I found from Brigand MP Madeleine Moon in the Times Online coverage of the story:

“I have long wondered about all of these websites. People will post information, post photographs, they will post contact details that they would never have walked into a local pub and done themselves, but they will post them online to total strangers. That is crazy,” she said.

“What worries me is that when you start entering a virtual world, as these young people are doing on this Bebo site, you lose the reality of loss, the actual consequences of what you are talking about and the horrible reality of death - in particular, the consequences on family and friends and the whole lack of a future for these young people, which is absolutely tragic,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“It is absolutely bizarre to think that a memorial wall gives you a reason for ending your life, cutting yourself off from a real future that would involve friends, family, marriage, building a home, building a career - all these real things that stretched in front of these young people - all for the ephemera of something on an internet wall,” she said.

“It absolutely defies belief.”

I can agree with the last sentence. The incidents do indeed defy belief, but what defies it even more so is that there are still folks in this world that believe that the Internet can induce suicide. To make matters worse, the cops investigating the matter seem to think along the same lines. From the same story:

South Wales Police fear that the reason could be simpler. One officer said: “They may think it’s cool to have a memorial website. It may even be a way of achieving prestige among their peer group.”

So let’s bring this whole thing back around to reality for a minute. Back when I was in high school, I had a really good friend of mine, one with whom I ate lunch with on a near daily basis and shared several computer classes with his older brother, hung himself with no warning signs whatsoever. The town in which I grew up was not metropolitan, by any means, but wasn’t a town of 20 people and a ‘coon dawg either. Still, even without the aid of the Internet, social networks, or any other devil boxes, there were two other copycat suicides that took place in my school alone.

Looking at the town of Bridgend for a moment, the city website says the area is home to around 128,000 people, or about roughly double the folks who lived in the school district I lived in as a teen. Given that it’s a small enough city that just about every kid knows each other, the Werther effect based on just my own anecdotal experience places the event about on par with what is normal.

Does this mean that the whole thing should be written off and forgotten about then? Of course not, that’s not what I’m driving at. Copycat suicides are a known psychological/sociological condition, and should be treated appropriately in the home and with professional help.

My point is blaming the social networks for the problem may make for a satisfactory scapegoat for grieving parents and communities, but will in no way solve the problem.

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Asterpix, the company that lets you put hyperlinks into your video clips, is getting ready to release Asterpic Pro. This new offering lets you do a little bit more with your video clips, including customization options like hyperlinks, hotspots, logos and an icon link. You’ll also be able to do things like control the length of time a hotsot follows an item, set default hotspot markers, and use a “point and shoot” authoring interface to get the job done.

Aside from the technological advances that come with a Pro account, Asterpix has also added some options that speak to its overall usability and hopes of becoming a more robust tool for a variety of uses across business users. The Pro account also offers a collaboration tool so multiple users can work together in the creation of an interactive video, and Asterpix Pro will also give you reporting statistics, which include a breakdown of views/click stats per video, as well as hotspot, by their time period.

This last feature is probably among the most important that Asterpix can extend to users, especially as advertising picks up for online video. These types of stats offer more information than just the number of people that watched a video, or how long a video was played. This type of technology will become increasingly important for companies that look to extend a more interactive advertising option for videos. It’s yet another way in which advertisers and consumers alike can experiment with the interactivity of online videos.

Outquib is an upcoming site that lets you debate or voice your cause, rally up other users around the topic, and see where things go. The end result is an ever-changing collection of opinions that aim to represent the population. With all this activity, outquib is a very busy site, and can be somewhat overwhelming when you first check it out (simple landing page explaining the basics of outquib’s service could soften this blow). Outquib has given us a few invites, so click here to try out the site.

The content on the site is made up almost entirely of users’ posted opinions. These can display in some areas on an individual basis, meaning a module showing the top opinion posts can each be on a variety of topics, and will be displayed without the context of their larger discussions. You can see the main topic for this opinion post, as well as the user that created it. There’s an option, in this case, to continue on to the larger discussion page that’s been created.

Each debate has an overview, displaying how most people feel one way or another, and a list of the influential posts. These are the posts that have been rated by users in a positive manner, meaning they’ve gained the most support and have now become influential. State your stance on the issue by selecting a position from the dropdown box, and feel free to elaborate accordingly with an opinion post of your own. All the items you’ve viewed, voted on and posted on will appear on your profile page, along with the activity of your friends.

This all boils down to a digg-like system that’s being formated around individual topics, which can be quite specific depending on the user that has created it, and the users that subsequently participate in it. These highly active discussion tools can provide a lot of value when placed in an ideal environment, but do require a good amount of very active users in order to provide such value.

That being said, it’s easier to engage users with these types of sites when there’s an easy interactive option that lets users do things like receive RSS feeds for users they’re following, filter discussions based on their social graph, post to a discussion via email or SMS, and a very easy way to stay updated of new postings, replies and comments on topics of interest. While sites like coComment has developed tools that let you do this across various networks, others like Digg are beginning to implement such tools for their own networks as well.

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If you’re a subscriber to Startup Schwag, you probably already know that this month’s schwag bag included the Mashable Potato Head shirt, which was actually designed back in November by one of our readers in our t-shirt design contest. Here, Lisa Brewster of Sopistechate models the shirt for us:

Thanks to Lisa for modeling, and thanks to Startup Schwag for spreading the Mashable goodness. In case you don’t know, Startup Schwag is a “startup schwag of the month club” that delivers new t-shirts and other random gear from Web companies each month.

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Search and publisher services company Inform Technologies has raised $15 million in a third round of funding. Led by Spark Capital, this latest round brings the total amount raised by Inform Technologies to “approximately $25 - $27 million to date,” according to Paid Content, giving the company a reported valuation of over $50 million.

Initially launched as a consumer news search site in 2004, Inform Technologies has since shifted gears to serving publishers with a suite of white-label services, which includes offering editorial links on publishers’ stories from third-party sites. Having forged relationships with major media brands like Conde Nast, The New York Sun and IDG to name a few, it’s white-label approach is a result of changing times in regards to the manner in which information is delivered. It’s a road others have had to travel, including Reuters, especially in the face of startups like Mochila and Pluck that are gaining traction, providing similar services for one or all of the tools that Inform is currently tackling.

Of course the most recent trend we’ve seen in this sector is a dedicated segment for the offering of news video content for use by web publishers, across a variety of topics. In speaking with a few others that deal with this act of bridging the gap between old and new media, we’ll be hearing of a few more announcements of startups and developments in this space as well. I think the overall hope by traditional media’s involvement in all this is to not only find a way to insert their content deeper into social media, but to increase the potential of their online presence in a very qualitative manner.

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