Brokaw had pretty good info. Meebo users are now able to work with Facebook accounts again. Here’s CEO Seth Sternberg’s message to his users:

Good news!

Facebook Chat is back.

In my last blog post (linked), I told you we were removing Facebook for a little while in order to incorporate a new way of connecting to their network.

After some hard work from the folks here at Meebo and help from a whole host of people at Facebook, we now have Facebook back in Meebo.

Plus, Meebo is now the first launch partner of the ‘alpha’ version of the Facebook Connect + Chat integration. That’s pretty cool.

The method for connecting is slightly different than the other networks on Meebo, but it works basically the same way. You can login to Facebook from the front page or, if you have a Meebo account, login with your Meebo username and add Facebook as a network account from inside Meebo.

Thanks for your patience while we were getting Facebook up and running again.

We hope this helps you keep in touch with all your Facebook friends!”

Last week Mark Zuckberg’s company sued Power.com, a social network aggregator, because the company allowed Facebook users to plug into the site without actually visiting Facebook itself. Today, instant-messaging aggregator Meebo is unplugging itself from Facebook.

No idea if legal threats were brought up in this case, but the parallel seems pretty clear: Facebook will offer outside sites access to its user base, but only on its own terms.

In both cases, Facebook wanted the would-be partner sites to use its recently launched Facebook Connect service. Last week, Power.com founder Steve Vacahni told me that he and Facebook had “resolved” their issues, and that Facebook’s lawyers had told him the suit would be dropped shortly. But as far as I know Facebook has yet to withdraw its complaint.

Which has probably served as an effective warning for Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg, who sent out this memo to his users tonight:

Hi Meebo,

Got some bad news. :(

As a bunch of you already know (because you’ve been using it), we recently added Facebook Chat into Meebo.

We have been speaking to the Facebook team, and it turns out, they’d like us to connect to their network in a different way. In the interim, they asked us take Facebook off Meebo, and we said ‘okay.’

However, we were glad to hear that the Facebook team was genuinely excited to see their network on Meebo, especially since they already have plans to open Facebook Chat. They also committed resources from their Chat and Facebook Connect teams to do extra work with us to get Facebook Chat back on Meebo ‘really, really soon.’

Work began this week, so stay tuned. We expect some all nighters on both sides!

Seth

P.S. Meebo grew in December. We reached close to 45 million people, a new record, including 2.5 million via Meebo Community IM. So it’s not all bad news… :)”

Update — here’s comment from Facebook:

We are excited to be working with Meebo to implement Facebook Chat using Facebook Connect. Their current integration was launched without meeting the policies we have in place to assure the trust users have established on Facebook is maintained when they interact with their Facebook friends around the Web.

We announced our plans to open Facebook Chat to third-party Websites in 2008 and are working closely with Meebo to create a great experience for Facebook users that use their service.

Last night, dressed in my kindergarten soccer-coach best (sneaks, sweats and athletic socks–glam!), I ventured over to the Tenderloin district of San Francisco to attend VentureBeat‘s party in honor of the launch of its new digital media blog.

Held at the Ambassador club on Geary Street, it was as if 1999 had never ended, and the huge crowd was partying like it was, well, 1999.

Shoulder to shoulder–or, in my puny case, shoulder to stomach–entrepreneurs, PR folks and a healthy smattering of press jammed into the venue, chattering about valuations, venture deals and other vacuous topics of Web 2.0.

Attendees included Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, Craigslist’s Jim Buckmaster, blogger Dan Gillmor and Microsoft-man-in-Silicon-Valley Dan’l Lewin (who gave us bupkis info about the deal, as you can see in the video).

Also in the video, in order, Meebo Co-Founder Seth Sternberg (fresh from a big funding); VentureBeat’s new editor of its digital media blog, Eric Eldon; Lewin; Gillmor; Valleywag’s Owen Thomas; and, finally, VentureBeat Editor and Founder Matt Marshall.

Last week, I visited Meebo, the Web-based instant messaging company, at their headquarters on Castro Street in Mountain View, Calif.

Why? Well, like a lot of Web 2.0 companies, because it’s a hot and hyped little start-up with a fast-growing audience for its–wait for it!–widgets!

But Meebo makes actually useful widgets, such as its flagship unified instant-messaging offering. Thus, in an endless sea of useless and juvenile apps, that immediately makes BoomTown happy and interested.

And, backed by Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, it also has a solid team, although it is one still in search of a much more solid business plan.

Which is: Advertising, of course! (Which is: Web 2.0′s possibly dubious mantra of mantras! Presumably, if you say it enough times, it will come true!)

How hot and hyped Meebo is was in evidence, when this article in VentureBeat posted yesterday claimed that the company was raising $25 million to $30 million at a valuation of $250 million.

Meebo’s last $12.5 million round valued the company at an already kooky $60 million to $70 million. The company was started in 2005.

Ouch, my head hurts from the bubble atmosphere that persists in Silicon Valley, even as our economy is tanking and the Fed can barely prop it up. But I was already in pain at the $850 million that AOL forked over for the very-nice-but-very-not-worth-$850-million Bebo, so please pardon my deep and unfulfilled need for sanity.

Still, it is hard not to like what Meebo is doing, which is a million times more useful than some widget makers. Basically, it solves the interoperability problem in instant messaging, by allowing a user to chat across the most popular sites–AIM, Google (GOOG) Talk, Yahoo (YHOO) Messenger and Microsoft’s (MSFT) chat service.

It also offers chat rooms to sites across the Web, branded as Meebo Rooms, like the one below on Meebo’s valuation, with lots of cool features, such as the ability to play videos that are embedded in them.

These products have attracted tens of millions of unique monthly users, trading over 100 million messages a day, although–as I said–it is not clear how money will be made providing this useful service.

Meebo, like a lot of similar companies, has struck some interesting ad partnerships, including with record companies, but–no matter what anyone says–it is obviously too soon to tell how effectively it will perform.

Luckily, in this video, two of Meebo’s founders–Seth Sternberg and Sandy Jen (the other is Elaine Wherry, who is not in this video)–as well as recently hired CNET vet Martin Green, who is handling business development, explain it all for you!

Here’s the video: