We've been tracking the progress of Meebo 's Community IM bar for a long time now: it was announced back in July 2008, started rolling out in October 2008, and is now exposed to nearly 100 million people worldwide on dozens of partner sites. Clearly it's making good progress, but since launch the options available to publishers for customizing the bar have been quite limited — you basically had to use Meebo's default layout and buttons, and couldn't include any custom links. Today Meebo is a launching a new Programming API that changes this, allowing publishers to make significant changes to the community bar. Up until now, the Meebo bar has always consisted of a Chat area in the far right (similar to Facebook Chat), a share button in the far left, and occasionally an ad on the left as well. Now, publishers will be able to introduce their own menus and buttons. For example, I could include a button that listed the top five most popular posts on TechCrunch. Publishers have full control over what they show in their menus or widgets, so there's plenty of room for creativity.