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Post-AOL Bebo: Aggregation, IM, and Multimedia

Adam Ostrow — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 14:00:34 +0000

Bebo is launching a major redesign of its user homepages this morning, its first since being acquired by AOL for $850 million earlier this year. The changes give us some idea of what we might expect from Bebo going forward, and it’s much as you might expect from the social network now that it’s a part of AOL: tight integration with AIM, easy access to email, multimedia content, and in a bit of a twist, social aggregation features of the FriendFeed variety.

I’ve long believed that IM is perhaps the ultimate social graph – contacts organized into groups that you can contact in real-time. And while AOL might have missed out on its opportunity to cash in on this early in the social networking boom, AIM still boasts more than 28 million users per month according to comScore. Will Bebo be the golden goose that finally makes this concept a success? Here’s a look at what they’re up to:

Instant Messaging

Bebo now lets AIM users login to the site using their screenname and password. And, similar to other data portability initiatives, that means you’ll be able to see which of your AIM buddies already use Bebo, giving you an instant social network when you access the site for the first time. You’ll also be able to chat with those friends through a buddy list that has been integrated into the Bebo interface, which combines your friends from both Bebo and AIM.

Social Aggregation

Back in August, AOL made a significantly smaller acquisition – FriendFeed competitor Socialthing. The service – which was still in private beta when AOL bought it – is a major part of the homepage, allowing you to see updates from your Bebo friends from other services like Twitter, Flickr, and Del.icio.us. Bebo plans to open this up to allow you to subscribe to updates from friends who don’t necessarily use Bebo, so you can see everyone’s updates in one place.

Email

While checking your email is seemingly easy enough on its own, Bebo has decided to integrate it into their user’s homepages. You’ll be able to check accounts on AOL, Gmail, or Yahoo Mail, with support for users of Microsoft Exchange email expected early next year. This isn’t full-functioning web-mail, rather, it’s just notification of new messages. This feature seems like a bit of the “build a better mouse trap” philosophy of portals like AOL and Yahoo, but nonetheless, could be useful for those that don’t keep email open 24×7 in its own tab.

Multimedia Content

One big advantage of being part of AOL and parent company Time Warner is that Bebo has access to a lot of multimedia content. Bebo users can subscribe to this content, and now in the new design, receive recommendations based on their interests as well as what their friends are watching or listening to. As opposed to a video destination site like Hulu, Bebo hopes to make this tool more about social discovery – finding new content to watch based on what your social network is consuming.

Final Thoughts

I like where Bebo is going with this. While the social network itself is huge in the UK, in the US, it’s relatively small compared to giants Facebook and MySpace. Rather than try and compete directly with these social networks, they are taking concepts that are proving successful with so-called early adopters – like lifestreaming – and trying them with a mainstream audience.

And while AOL already tried unsuccessfully once to turn its dominant IM platform into a social network (AIMPages), at the time, they didn’t have the meat of a top-tier site like Bebo behind it. This time around, Bebo will also become heavily integrated into the actual AIM software, which should drive much further adoption. While one can certainly still question whether Bebo was worth the lofty price tag, it’s at least somewhat re-assuring that there is a coherent strategy coming into place around it.

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Cyberbullying Will Stop When Adults Level With Their Kids

Paul Glazowski — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 23:54:30 +0000

Were you bullied in school or out of school by classmates or students from warring institutions? Would you tell a parent or guardian about it?

Some of you would answer Question #1 in the affirmative, and would give a “probably not” or a “definitely not” to the followup. In part because the only thing worse than dishing those details to your folks is to have your folks talk to their folks about their unruly kid. So let us begin by saying that a study published in The Journal of School Health is telling you much of what you already know. Which is that you just don’t mention that stuff.

Most don’t mention it, anyway. This has long been the case on the playground, in the cafeteria, in the gym locker room, on the athletic field, and the lavatory. As well as for the last few years in which teens have come to call the Internet their digital home, where friendly faces meet taunts and teases and out-and-out venom and aggression that inevitably gets tagged as the classic war amongst peers. The problem is that the graffiti is particularly hard to erase on the Web.

The study was organized by Jaana Juvonen and Elisheva F Gross, a fellow and a professor at UCLA, respectively, and the core finding is that bullying is prevalent among teens (at least 41% of the 1,454 surveyed). Go figure. Also, Juvonen and Gross found that teens think slander is only being directed at them.

The first point I can accept, with some duh for garnish. But I imagine the second is misinterpreted. Or has simply been taken too much at face value. For one, students today, as I imagine students of years past, have largely been groomed to be self-absorbed. Not anti-social or anything of that sort, but focused inward. Instead of cultivating interpersonal relationships with others, its been about “fitting in” to a particular bloc. Which gives peers in general the perception that there are social rules and barriers where there really are none. Hence the tribal, not communal and productive nature of the classroom and all things beyond that generations have tried to achieve. So to be effective in stopping bullying, online or off, has hardly anything to do with placing restrictions or limits or parental controls on matters. It has much to do with uprooting long-held behavioral norms and conventions. How does that happen?

Well, making such changes is harder to do the advent of free online tools, and tools that essentially do away with physical barriers. Users cannot only just connect with people within their own communities, but with the world at large. Which on the one hand is a phenomenal convenience, but alternately is something that can carry a measure of permanence and inescapability. There’s no easy way to whitewash MySpace, in other words.

Which brings us to an item that the researchers responsible for the survey about cyberbullying reveal, something that warrant heaps upon heaps of attention. And that is that parents and educators alike need to get in tune with children’s lives, online and off. That is what can initiate a stop, or a least a major decrease, in “nastiness,” for lack of a better word. (Feel free to contribute better phrasing in the comments.)

No, no, none of that “my Mom and/or Dad want to be my friend on MySpace and Facebook” stuff. That’s borderline nonsense. Rather, elders need to be familiar with such services to the point that a conversation, a real-world, kitchen-table conversation, can be established about them.

Some adults may have no desire to do so, but children naturally recognize this disinterest, and it only makes it less likely that if problems do occur, children will have the inclination to bring them to parents’ view. Given enough time, fixing a situation can be a major undertaking. With plenty of pills in the middle. If parents swallow some of their pride and their fear of their offspring, a psychological jump can be made there. If the jump proves successful, on the other side of the divide is trust. And trust dictates behavior.

There then is the start of a “trickle down” effect that happens not only in family life, but that can eventually permeate the educational and social ecosystem. Of course, it’s a far more complex picture with Internet activity involved, but it may well be possible that, with the availability of online networks, a shift to the positive will be accelerated rather than taken asunder. That’s an optimist’s view for you. Any takers? Any dissenters?

(Image credits: top: Current.com; middle: Sperryclass.com)

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Bebo IM Was Removed Days Ago and Nobody Seems to Care

Paul Glazowski — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 20:50:08 +0000

If the feelings of the most outspoken Bebo users are any indication, Bebo IM, the relative equivalent to Facebook Chat, has few fans. Very few.

What was introduced nearly one month prior to today to a notably negative reception by network members, Bebo IM was, according to employee Mike Watts, temporarily removed for maintenance 9 days ago. The same message was delivered 5 days ago. And hardly a peep has been made about the disruption. A look at recent talk on the Bebo Backstage shows why. The consensus might best be summed up in words of commenter Ross: “don’t bring it back, it sucks.”

Though the reasoning for the verbal opposition to Bebo IM may not encompass all users, it seems to be the case that users would tolerate the option of an instant messaging system, if it could be put in place or removed as the individual user sees fit. But of course if respondents were to keep the service off, Bebo, owned by AOL, would see quite a number of members disregard the development. Bebo then gains little love for IM no matter the direction it takes with the component. (A Bebo App by the name of Live Chat, alternatively, lists 24,770 users.)

With that in mind, is an IM service on board a social network purposeful on the whole? Or is it a needless distraction? Is it all about implementation? How does Facebook Chat stack up? Is the way MySpace IM functions more appealing?

How much do you miss Bebo IM? ( surveys)

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Bebo Puts Open Media Platform to Use Through ESPN Deal

Stan Schroeder — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:44:00 +0000

Remember Bebo’s open media platform initiative? In short, it means that Bebo users can include premium music and video content in their profiles. At launch, Bebo had a long list of media partners, including BBC, Yahoo, Last.fm, MTV Networks, and ESPN.

Now, the partnership with ESPN is actually visible to users, who can access ESPN’s short videos, including highlights from sport events and short clips from ESPN original programming, through Bebo’s open media platform. The simplest way to find it is to go to this address: www.bebo.com/ESPNVideoSC; unfortunately it all works only if you’re located in the US.

Specifically, this content includes “SportsCenter Right Now, a twice-daily capsule of top sports stories, highlights and breaking news; clips from ESPN programs such as Mike and Mike in the Morning, Pardon the Interruption and Around the Horn; and breaking news and game clips from major professional and college teams and sporting events.”

It’s all nice and dandy, but I always have the feeling that users are being given scraps instead of the real thing: full shows, entire sporting events. This deal certainly won’t hurt Bebo’s Open Media Platform, but from the user’s perspective, it’s really not all that big of a deal.

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Bebo is Forcibly Changing Usernames

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 03:53:16 +0000

I first saw it over in a post by Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim, but in the post he lays the tracks to a whole epidemic of unauthorized name changes by top social networking service Bebo. It appears, at least from the mountain of bewildered queries on random web forums as well as Twitter that at least hundreds of folks are having their usernames changed, and are being refused any explanation whatsoever.

Andy and others who’ve documented this have said they’ve received emails that encourage folks to go check out the Bebo documentation for more information, but our scan of the help section offers very little helpful information on the matter.

It’s not a particularly harmful change, and in many cases, all that’s being added is an underscore to the name (at least in most of the cases I’ve seen documented). It is odd that it’s going on, and the oddity is further compounded that no readily available information on the matter is available and that Bebo is offering no explanation when asked.

We’ve put in a word with Bebo to get a comment, but we don’t expect anything until start of business tomorrow.

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Bebo IM Debuts, and Users Are Grumpy

Paul Glazowski — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 23:16:47 +0000

If it’s Bebo that you prefer to the larger social networks of the world, but want to enjoy the equivalent of Facebook Chat within your own friendly circle, how’s this. Bebo’s Emma Carlsgaard let it be known that a feature dubbed Bebo IM is now live. You can interact with contacts much the same as you would with a standalone instant messaging service.

The functions involved are simple enough. Chat with one or more persons. Block people you dislike. Report vagrants. All that fun stuff. Some words of warning, though. Site members who’ve responded to the announcement are largely unimpressed. A number of users complain of its being dysfunctional. Others want it shut off. Only a minority of respondents appear to enjoy what’s come of Bebo developers’ labor.

The IM option is relatively inconspicuous. It’s open by default and and sits in a partially collapsible box in the lower right corner of your browser window. Simply click on the miniaturized icon representing an IM contact list and you’re shown a summary of your friends. Click a name and start talking. Close any open windows when you’re done.

If the initial user commentary is anything to go by, you may encounter buggy operation. But you may not, so give it a try, we say. Nothing to download, after all. There’s definitely merit to the popular suggestion of keeping with your preferred IM service for the simple fact that it is what’s known. Oppositely, Bebo had to deliver an answer to Facebook’s own service one way or another. Whatever the case, it seems some extra time in the cooker likely would’ve ensured a more celebratory debut.

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Bebo and Vogue.TV to Air New Fashion-Focused Web Series

Kristen Nicole — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 22:14:23 +0000

A new series called Model.Live is debuting this week on Bebo (see here). As you may have guessed, the show is about models. Produced by IMG Media and Vogue.TV, this made-for-Web series follows three female models, Austria Alcantara, Cato van Ee and Madeline Kragh along their journeys from their homes to the catwalk.

The show will premier on Vogue.TV tonight, and will be redistributed on Bebo, where each model will also have a profile for updating their blogs, video diaries, text messages, photos, schedules, and more. This format is rather typical of what we’ve seen for webisodes, especially those that are syndicated on networks like Bebo and MySpace, as they leverage the multi-faceted capabilities for sharing and spreading content throughout a community in hopes of engaging viewers on a higher and more integral level. It’s worked for the most part, carrying on the legacy of EQAL from LG15’s success on YouTube into the Bebo-specific KateModern series.

Model.Live’s sponsor, Express, has found some sensible branding opportunities with this very targeted content, providing featured merchandise available for purchase on its retail website. It seems like a prime opportunity for the inclusion of interactive video ads such as those offered by Overlay.tv and others, especially as such Web-only series begin to provide improved traction for brand marketing, and potential content for mainstream media outlets.

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AOL Acquires Lifestreaming Service Socialthing

Don Reisinger — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 04:00:24 +0000

In a move that aims at shoring up AOL’s stable of social networks, the company announced today that it has acquired Socialthing!, pending the satisfaction of certain undisclosed closing conditions.

After the acquisition closes, AOL says that Socialthing will become a part of the company’s People Networks division. Currently, AOL’s People Networks division is made up of social platforms, like Bebo, AIM, ICQ, Goowy, and Yedda, that AOL believes, will lead the company’s online presence going forward.

The acquisition of Socialthing, which is still in private beta, strongly suggests AOL is trying to become a major player in the social networking space and attempting to capitalize on some of the fads of the day. In just the past few months, AOL acquired Bebo and launched a lifestreaming initiative within AIM that has pushed the company towards a more community-driven focus.

Perhaps most interesting about this deal is the fact that AOL has shaped up to be the company that Time Warner is trying to sell and all the while, it’s acquiring companies itself to bolster its own standing online and try to find its way as editorial and revenue woes continue to plague it. Regardless, AOL is well on its way to amassing a solid lineup of hopeful social networks that it hopes will make it the hub for all your community needs.

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KateModern’s 12-Hour Finale Binger

Paul Glazowski — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:49:09 +0000

We told you last month about the planned wrap-up of KateModern, the very successful Internet television show exclusive to the AOL-owned Bebo social network. Well, today’s the day that all is put to pasture. KateModern is having its finale, and it’s going out with 12 episodes in 12 hours. The countdown to the series close began earlier this morning and will stretch to 7PM EST, with hourly videos releases complemented by live chats with and among the fanbase.

The program’s following has been an extensive one. Its production company, EQAL, claims for KateModern an average weekly viewership of about 1m, surpassing the popularity of virtually all other original Web-based programs, including LonelyGirl15, a show also produced by EQAL. While that number has been argued by some to be an overestimate of KateModern’s sustained reach, the impact the show has had on the Web media space is certainly a lasting one.

In fact, due to its viral achievements EQAL was able to secure both a $5 million Series A funding round and CBS partnership in the space of a single month.

Today’s KateModern conclusion, after its 300 episode run, is one which its producers have clearly wished to make absolute this time around. It’s been said that the murder mystery has effectively run its course, and to exit on a relatively high note with respect to viewer numbers helps EQAL to see that the show maintains its status as a major hit, start to finish. Studio co-founder Miles Beckett said, “KateModern has reached a critical peak in the storyline and as we complete the cycle, the many threads and mysterious elements will come together with an amazing conclusion.”

If you’ve kept your eyes peeled for new KateModern developments since the start of the season or even the show’s debut, you’ve likely already been made full aware of the day’s schedule. But for you casual viewers who’ve strayed or skipped over the episodic reel, you’ll see pressing questions answered, hour by hour this morning, afternoon, and evening.

I can’t say I’ve kept an eye on the KateModern storyline. But if its finale is anything like those provided by the arresting yet frustratingly open-ended ABC program “Lost”, well, I would hope it’s not, and that all pieces to the puzzle will be revealed. Share your thoughts of KateModern’s last broadcasts in the comments!

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SocialMedia to Push Privacy Boundaries with Social Banner Ads

Paul Glazowski — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:21:16 +0000

SocialMedia, an advertising network which purports to deliver marketing services to over 5,000 applications spread throughout Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, and MySpace, is announcing a new option to clients and their users, Social Banners.

In effect, these graphics allow SocialMedia and its partners the ability to include registered users of social services within advertisements shown to users’ friends when those contacts use an application associated with SocialMedia and its advertising partners. Whether it be your name or your photograph, SocialMedia is looking to give banner advertisements somewhat of a more personal, trustworthy appeal through custom automated design and thus enhance ad engagement. As SocialMedia’s Dave Gentzel explains it, “…our goal is not to put people inside of ads as a gimmick, as gimmicks die and provide little value to anyone. Instead, we want to facilitate real conversation and interaction around certain products and brands.”

SocialMedia is promising to give users of Web-based services the ability to choose to share this data with the ad network and, subsequently, any listed friends with a particular application(s) installed. In the case of Facebook, SocialMedia claims it sweeps the accounts of willing participants only to the point of their respective profile images, to be sized only as large as 50×50 pixels. And given that users can set privacy controls to bar SocialMedia from going so far as using the image, it is essentially giving networkers free reign as to what they wish to share with the advertising network. A so-called “opt-out mechanism” is also available for those who wish to exit stage left, so to speak.

As for the company’s financial incentive for the integration of Social Banners in its advertising network, Gentzel says, “We don’t get paid to put you in ads. We’re getting paid to present you with the opportunity to interact with a product socially.”

SocialMedia is clearly trying to walk the line between unwanted and unwarranted privacy invasions and the presumed added impact of an individually-approved product or service promotions. It is giving users the option to place their names alongside [insert brand name here] to automatically share with friends what it is they (ideally) like.

Speaking for my own self interests, rather than offer SocialMedia the chance to include my name or my image within a marketing campaign, regardless of whether it does or does not include personal financial recompense, I’d much prefer to give friends recommendations as I see fit. Via a Facebook wall post, for instance. Where do you stand on this matter, given the choice?

Social Media

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The Jonas Brothers Use Bebo and Kyte for UK Crossover

Kristen Nicole — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:04:58 +0000

US musical sensations the Jonas Brothers are looking to Bebo to help make them equally as huge in the UK. With a dedicated page on Bebo, the UK-based social network is prime space for accessing teens and young adults, especially on the music front. Having sold over 1.2 million copies of their debut album, the Jonas Brothers would like to take that success overseas, hoping to continue the momentum of their first UK tour.

When attempting such a crossover move, artists often have a lot of cultural differences and similarities to consider. Even though MySpace has a UK presence, Bebo remains prominent in this part of the world. And though Facebook has proceeded to successfully expand its social network across the UK, Bebo is a better platform for marketing a musician’s career.

The Jonas Brothers are still making it easy for fans to take their content across the Web. With another partnership with self-broadcasting tool Kyte, the Jonas Brothers are also streaming a good amount of casual content through their channel to give fans a more personal look at their lives and careers. You can find the Jonas Brothers’ Kyte channel on their Bebo page.

As with most bigger artists, having such promotions online are extensions of existing success thats driven initially by record labels (in this case, Universal Music). Nevertheless, it’s promising to know that an artist can have their own promotional site on a far-reaching social network and expand on that with self-broadcasting tools like Kyte. It’s becoming easier for artists to push their careers in this manner, but it’s still up to services like Bebo and Kyte to face the challenge of making it easier for the rest of the world to find and consume the content being produced by others.

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Are The Social Networking Greats Nearing Their Limits?

Paul Glazowski — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 20:17:22 +0000

So comScore [CNET] tells us Facebook surpassed MySpace in worldwide visitors for the first time. This shift evidently occurred sometime in the last few months, between March and May.

Yawn.

I’ll be frank. I was surprised to hear MySpace take second to Facebook. I didn’t think it would happen. At least not now. A while back I saw MySpace a good bit ahead of Facebook, and I figured, at that point, with north of a hundred million users a pop, neither had it in them to make a big leap forward. Evidently Zuckerberg has proved able to move forward faster than Murdoch. Or the people actually in charge of running MySpace, and not just raking cash.

But as far as financing goes, of course, MySpace still has the advantage. Several hundred million more income per year, if Rupert & Co. estimates correctly. (He says $800m, give or take. Which is fairly good, actually, if you look at where the company was the year after News Corp laid down $580m for the network in mid-2005.) Looking at what Facebook’s lunar $15b valuation reveals of the company’s founder’s intentions, I’d say MySpace, whether #1 or #2 in worldwide activity, is standing on more solid ground - so to speak.

Here’s the thing, though. We’re, what, more than a year into the era of serious, big-money social working, with grand advertising exclusivity deals and some application awesomeness in the works? You’d think Facebook and MySpace would’ve each have shown the beginnings of their rise from nine-figure returns to ten. MySpace alone is sitting close to the mark.

Getting that extra zero is turning out to be a real you-know-what.

In fact, at this point, what I’m mulling now might not portend well for those sites’ futures. To put it bluntly, maybe they just aren’t cut out for that kind of life. I know, I know, sooner or later they will make a billion dollars each in the space of 12 months. Sometime down the line. MySpace definitely. Facebook probably. But for all of their respective founders’ claims to fates of gigantism (you could cut that egotism with a cleaver), their people/payback ratios don’t connote greatness.

To reference a well-respected blogger, while I wouldn’t agree completely with Om Malik’s latest assertion that social networking circuit’s experience of its “golden years…have led to the sector’s giants resting on their laurels,” I would second the core point of his subsequent argument:

The fundamental nature (and utility) of social networks hasn’t really changed. The platform-ization of social networks has led to the rise of social apps that are best described as time wasters. You can be fascinated by vampire bites and what not but in the end, there is a finite amount of time you can waste.

In other words, Social Networks need to find new purposes for people to come back every day and be loyal.

I, too, sense a forced effort to grow, to create value out of memberships. That MySpace or Facebook or Bebo could add a dozen million more users every month or every quarter indefinitely, and that they’d still be working within their self-imposed limit of social networking by way of profile building. (Which seems to get more tedious the more time the user invests in the effort.)

Now, seeing that there’s a ceiling to social networks is not a bad thing, per se. But we may be slowly learning that those ambitions for top-of-the-Web (again, in monetary terms, not page views, etc.) industrialization may not in the end present themselves. Sure, Facebook and MySpace and many others will be around for many years to come. But they may be nearing their moneymaking potential, and fairly quickly, too.

(Image source: MySpace)

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AIM + Bebo: A Great Idea, Five Years Ago

Adam Ostrow — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:37:44 +0000

AOL has announced that they’ve completed the purchase of Bebo, and as such, formed a new business unit called “People Networks” that combines the social network with AIM, ICQ, and other recently acquired businesses including Yedda and Goowy. Integration plans aren’t overly specific at the moment, but include “[letting] users merge AIM and Bebo profiles so they can use common screen names without re-registering.”

For AOL, this marks attempt #3 (or #4 or #5 if you go back to when AOL was the dominant ISP and everything took place inside AOL’s desktop software) at turning AIM into a major social network. First, there was AOL Journals, which tied blogging community features to AIM. Then came AIMPages, a web-based social network tied to AIM screennames. And now, rather than build something in-house, AOL has spent $850 million and will attempt to integrate AIM with an existing social network that reportedly has more than 40 million users.

I’ve long held the belief that IM is the ultimate social network – if you use it properly, you have your contacts sorted neatly into appropriate groups – colleagues, college buddies, family, etc. You have status updates (away messages), photos (buddy icons), and group options (chat). However, what has long been missing is the networking aspect – there is no easy way for my AIM contacts to see my buddy list and find out who they are, and hence, network. This is what AIM pages tried to do, and what I assume Bebo with AIM/ICQ will attempt to do, by combining a huge Web community with a huge IM community.

The problem is that the opportunity may have passed. The large social networks not only have their own integrated chat options (Facebook Chat and MySpace IM), but they also allow for third-party widgets and applications like Meebo that allow users to have their friends send them an IM directly from the Web. Additionally, IM as a medium now has a lot of competitors – private messaging on the social networks, free/low-cost calling via VoIP, and microblogging services like Twitter. Are there really tens of millions of AIM users out there who aren’t yet on Facebook or MySpace? That seems to be what AOL/Bebo is banking on.

As AOL alludes to in their press release this morning, there are lots of other cross-marketing opportunities across the AOL network that will provide ample opportunity to drive further adoption of Bebo. But my feeling is the “power AIM” users who would be interested in integration with a social network are already on Facebook or MySpace, and unlikely to switch just for the marginal advantage of having your screenname and social networking username one and the same.

A social network built around an instant messaging network was a great idea five years ago (and still a good idea two years ago when AOL launched AIMPages), but at this stage in the game, I have my doubts.

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Bebo Installs New Head Of Sales Specific To Irish Market

Paul Glazowski — Sat, 17 May 2008 21:50:01 +0000

We’ve said it numerous times before, and we’ll say it again. Bebo is big in the UK. One of the largest social networks in the region. More specifically, it’s Ireland’s #1.

So it presumably comes as welcome news to Irish users that the company, recently sold to AOL to the tune of $850 million, has recently appointed a Mr Philip Macartney as its new head of sales to operate out of Dublin. According to Hit Search, Macartney is tasked with advertising sales for Bebo as well as the development of content and partnership opportunities for the Irish market.

Macartney’s biography shows him to be an advertising specialist in Ireland for a good five years before making his way to Bebo, working on cross-media advertising, from traditional broadcasts to the Web. He comes off a role as senior agency sales executive for the Dublin’s FM104. Prior to his stay with FM104 he was a founding member of Every1Online.

In March 2007, Mashable founder and CEO Pete Cashmore touched on the topic of Bebo’s stellar growth, which the company claimed had allowed it to surpass Google as the top site in Ireland. And while the social network’s strong rise has tapered off somewhat, as have its competitors, it continues to reside among the most influential properties in the area and likely remains the most regularly trafficked online venue in the country. This would explain Bebo’s intent to devote an executive resource familiar with the market to further cultivate its user base there.

(Image source: Macartney’s Bebo page)

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Ringside Makes Social Software Applications Open Source

Paul Glazowski — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:15:13 +0000

Ringside Networks, a new company founded by Bob Bickel, a former Java pro for JBoss, is planning a launch Tuesday for an open-source “social application server” that will help developers run applications built for particular websites, like Facebook, reported CNET’s Matt Asay and Martin LaMonica. Ringside finds that, among the 19,000+ third-party applications built for Facebook alone, there is a clear opening for an agent such as itself to deliver devoted server strength for such developments.

The company is making it particularly easy for coders to build and run applications on Facebook’s platform by utilizing it’s so-called “social application engine,” which enables the transfer, or “sharing,” of Facebook user information. Also, Ringside intends to deliver OpenSocial integration with its services as well, which “will allow the server to tap into other social networks such as MySpace, Orkut, and Bebo,” the company’s founder explained. Ringside will establish its OpenSocial connections in Q2 2008.

Perhaps Ringside’s most biggest advantage for the application developers it strives to attract developers is its inherent devotion to open-source with respect to data access and its willingness to adapt and grow to encompass all types of applications, be they Facebook-specific or created to more broadly address user needs and demands across numerous social networks.

As the allure of cross-compatibility has shown to make projects such as OpenSocial and DataPortability increasingly enticing, the potential for Ringside to become a brand well-regarded throughout the industry makes it an entity on the server side that may well be worth watching.

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Billy Bragg Tells Bebo To Give Some Of The Millions To The Musicians

Paul Glazowski — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 13:16:03 +0000

I’m not going to knock Billy Bragg here. “Mr Love & Justice” is really as cool as they come. He’s got quite a far-reaching audience. He’s amassed much cred in his pockets over the years. No doubt about that.

But reading his opinion piece published in today’s New York Times concerning what he calls “the royalty scam” conducted by Internet music portals like MySpace and Bebo, I can’t help but say: wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Bragg says that social networking sites who’ve managed to grow to serve tens of millions of individuals, and subsequently attract large purchase prices (MySpace’s $580 million sale to News Corp, and AOL’s recent acquisition of Bebo for $850m), should offer some recompense to the independent music artists who’ve built themselves on those networks, and consequently built those networks into larger, more valuable entities.

The issue I take with that argument is…well…any such recompense simply wasn’t part of the deal. A deal which remains to this day. The arrangement provided by social networks to musicians is exposure within the sphere created by those sites. And a way to promote new releases and live events. And, if artists (a term which is far too liberally applied today, I should add) so choose to do so, even offer an easy way to deliver downloads to fans. That’s all. No financial contracts. No payments based on track playback counts. Nothing like that. All they get is a vast ocean of music geeks to convert into followers. Or at least attempt to.

Which I imagine is something a great number of musicians have enjoyed quite a lot so far. Considering the fact that, a few years ago, they were altogether unable to build any popular backing without selling plastic out of the back of a van or tossing their tracks onto file sharing sites that could not effectively facilitate lots of “new discoveries” of their recordings, the ability to launch a fairly significant presence on social networks is a huge win for indie acts.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe in just payment to musicians on radio, whether over-the-air or over-the-Web, as well as through CD and download sales. I think that the record companies have provided the majority of working musicians with ridiculous contractual conditions and have not delivered what I would consider to be a fair percentage of retail income. I think a good portion of “signed” artists deserve more. A lot more. But as far as social networks like MySpace and Bebo are concerned, there’s really no basis to demand that they provide royalties. They didn’t start their businesses with the aim of directly sustaining musicians, financially speaking. They strove to become social networks. Big social networks. Full of tons of different people. Some musicians. Most not. Yes, musicians can build homes on such networks. And they can reap promotional benefits. But that’s about it. And musicians know this. They’re seem okay with the trade.

At the very least, they are more content than they would be if they had to continue submitting themselves, one demo at a time, to the critics at record labels for contractual consideration. Soul-sucking contractual consideration, at that.

So I say keep on keeping on, Billy. Your songwriting is superb. Without question. Only, your argument as stated in the Times piece doesn’t hold up. Though the Birches have reaped a $600m windfall from their social experiment, they really have no obligation to provide any portion of it to musicians.

(Image source: Wikipedia.org)

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Bebo Founders Talk History Of Network And Past Web Efforts

Paul Glazowski — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 13:22:27 +0000

Husband and wife start social networking site. Husband and wife spend a couple of years growing social networking site to eventually serve 40 million users. Husband and wife sell social networking site to AOL for $850m. Husband and wife walk away from deal with 70% of the gross payout.

Yes, Michael and Xochi Birch, a married duo - he a 37-year-old Brit, she a 36-year-old Californian - are cashing out with a hefty portion of the sale proceeds of Bebo. Roughly $600m. The second largest slice from the purchase will go to the VC firm Balderton Capital, at the sum of $140m. The Sunday edition of the Times of London has an in-depth profile of Mr and Mrs Birch, discussing their personal history and the history of Bebo. It’s a fairly interesting read. I recommend.

A few notes worth mentioning. The Birches met in London, in that classic barroom setting, after Michael graduated with a physics degree from Imperial College of London. Eyeing the dot-com world with intrigue, the Birches tried to build a startup. Which proved unsuccessful. And then another. Again, a no-go. A third attempt met a similar fate. The fourth, however, was where they got a bit more lucky. The first online business of theirs that proved reasonably fruitful was called BirthdayAlarm, “a simple service that evolved into an e-cards business.” Didn’t make too much money, on the whole, but enough for the couple to get by.

Later, Michael observed the rise of Friendster, and after taking some general cues from the site structure, he started to code his own version of a social networking website. It went active half a month later. He called it Ringo. He watched the initial membership climb to 30,000 soon after first launch. Six months later, he and Xochi sold the site, purportedly due to inability to manage its growth effectively. Sometime thereafter, Bebo has its beginning, and went live in 2005. It didn’t become an immediate hit. It was aimed at people in their 30s, which didn’t fly with Web-connected teens.

After re-tooling a bit, of course, Bebo hit its stride, and the rest, as they say, is history.

One outstanding point to emphasize in Bebo’s timeline: Its founders discovered the loyalty of the company’s staff to be very fortuitous, some of which were recruited from more veteran Web companies like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. (A similar story to what we regularly hear in Mark Zuckerberg’s corner of networking industry.) Indeed, they claim “few (employees) have left the company since it began.” The strength of its workforce may well have contributed to Bebo’s fortunes and success among much larger success.

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Windows Live Spaces Traffic Takes A 15% Hit

Sean P. Aune — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 15:07:40 +0000

The latest report from Nielsen Online about traffic to social networking sites in the US shows Windows Live Spaces has taken a 15% hit for year-over-year February traffic.

Kip Kniskern of LiveSide points out that, though Windows Live Spaces came in 4th for the year, it does endured a 15% drop. A pretty significant fall, yes? MySpace is of course still the #1 network for unique visitors per month, and according to Nielsen’s numbers, grew 4% from last year. Facebook is #2, but its traffic is supposedly not yet half as trafficked as the market leader. LinkedIn sits firmly in 5th, with a hefty 271% growth trend in its pocket.

All of this data covers the February numbers, and with some of the major news that has hit so far in March, such as MySpace’s developer platform going live and AOL buying Bebo, 2008 is bound to be an even rougher time for Microsoft and its Windows Live Spaces property.

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Girls In US And UK Command Remarkable Web Usage Numbers

Paul Glazowski — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 18:35:42 +0000

Found in Sunday’s edition of The Times of London, an article by Kate Spicer and Abul Tahrreport documents a trend of increasing Web adoption among girls and young women in both the US and UK. This finding does not only pertain to blogging. It includes most all common and habitual tasks: shopping, social networking, referencing educational material, etc.

This transition to a Web populated with an increasingly active female usership is undoubtedly directly related to the advent of intuitive, easy-to-use software. Whereas software of years past took a substantial amount of technological know-how - of which the knowledge attainment process seemed to traditionally appeal to the majority-male geek crowd - today blogs, social networking accounts and retail shopping sites for physical and digital goods is no more complex to create and/or utilize than filling out very simple, straightforward registration and payment forms and navigating well-evolved user interfaces. This change to a more user-friendly industry environment has made for a mass migration of girls and women of just about all ages from a firmly offline existence, entirely uninterested in dealing with convoluted interfaces, to one very much connected, whether it be through iTunes or MySpace or countless other sites and services.

The most surprising revelation to be made about this trend to a new era in which women saturate numerous channels of the Web is that it has happened within such a small window of time. The movement has been only several years in the making, a timeframe far shorter than one marked by male interest in both localized and cloud-based technologies.

According to a recent Pew Internet Project targeted at teens, 35% of American girls have registered blogs, and 32% have multifaceted websites. (For boys, it is 20% and 22%, respectively.) Though those two segments can presently be taken as one and the same, the fact that a full third of all girls in the youth and young-adult demographics are chronicling their lives and maintaining online profiles is something that really does calls for celebration - especially celebration of Web designers and engineers, whose work has, after all, now been guaranteed fit for true mass consumption. Which is good news for, well, everyone. Men, women, boys, girls, geeks, non-geeks, etc.

Here are a few more figures to consider. 70% of girls in the US operate one or more social networking account. 57% of boys presently vouch for doing so themselves. In the UK, the figures are more equalized, but still 55% of the social networking market is comprised of female users.

It’s of course important to emphasize the fact that the propensities of girls versus boys as far as Web usage do vary. Girls are less likely than boys to produce videos and upload material to hosts like YouTube, for instance. (Not to mention the variance in news and entertainment consumption.)

But looking at the big picture, it is clear that females have taken great initiative in making their presence known on the Web, and are forcing more services to cater specifically to their demands. Though females remain a puzzling minority in the computer sciences sector of college-level educational institutions, they are effectively no longer a niche market. They stand on equal footing to males in the world of Web 2.0. And they’re only going to get more connected and more invested still.

I won’t press further with this report. I urge you to venture to the original article in the Sunday Times for a more thorough read on the matter. But one thing I wish to say here is this. The successful marketing push to attract girls and women to Web services is a hugely commendable accomplishment for the entire industry. Applause all around.

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Gaming To Carry And Grow Social Networks Well Into Future

Paul Glazowski — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:35:23 +0000

There is noticeably heightened interest being expressed in online gaming - particularly casual online gaming. Call it a World of Warcraft syndrome of some sort. Or call it the Wii Games-effect, if you like. What’s for certain, is that social gaming - and more and more often with Internet-based components - has been reborn, and is now bigger than ever. (Of course, one can argue that the market for multiplayer, whether networked or otherwise, never really diminished in appeal.)

Currently, there are three company names that come immediately to mind when conversation of online social gaming is at hand. First, there’s Facebook, which has essentially pioneered the integration of Web apps (a segment of which are designees of the gaming label) with social networking. And then there are two incredibly fast growing competitors: SGN (Social Gaming Network) and Zynga Game Network.

The goal of both SGN and Zynga is simple, but much work is undoubtedly involved in getting there. In short, it is to amass attractive catalogues of gaming titles for distribution to various location on the Net where social circles coalesce. As of late, both have even gone so far as to make acquisitions of still smaller production studios to aid their ascent to the top of the burgeoning industry of online games.

(There are a good share of independent portals that are working to join the fold, too. Doof is one example, which our own Kristen Nicole wrote a review about in early January.)

Even RealNetworks is purported to be interested in making its name known as a gaming brand of this “new age,” at least indirectly, through a possible acquisition of the massively popular Internet game Scrabulous; a title of Indian origins which has drawn the ire (we can smell hints of envy, as well) of Mattel and Hasbro. Both are big-name veterans of the classic board game genre.

All in all, there is no question that any and all of these high-profile stories, most of which have individually garnered many millions of dollars in investments at relatively youthful stages in their collective development, are proving that the interest in social gaming on the Web is strong and will only increase with time as cloud technologies targeted at the consumer space further invade the mainstream with each passing week, month, and season.

Therefore, it is likely time that we (and I include myself in that lineup) hang up any talk of the seemingly ephemeral nature of today’s premier class of social networks. No more talk about the demise of Facebook, alright? Or the chaotic downfall of MySpace. Or just about other big social brand of the moment. Because, if there’s one thing that helps platforms - and the brands behind those platforms - stick around for the long term, its entertainment. And in modern terms, that means games. Games, games, and more games.

Mind you, that doesn’t necessarily mean shoot-’em’-ups. Though that variety of first-person war games regularly attract a great deal of attention, there’s a steadily growing urge for the throw-back, the retro, the classic. The stuff that was so easy, so elementary, yet oh so fun. Which is an almost perfectly-timed shift of mood among the users of today’s set of Web-based social services.

I’ll be frank with you. I have at numerous moments over the past couple of years predicted the downfall of the online social network. MySpace. Facebook. Bebo. The lot of ‘em seemed in my view slated for short-term expiration. Be it in 2008, 2009, 2010. Sometime within the near future, I foresaw a fast-diminishing social Web. Primarily because, in 2006 and 2007, the industry appeared entirely inflated without being very much substantive.

But no more. The resilience and recent growth of social Web services appears increasingly solid. And the imminent addition of major investments in gaming and other forms of premium entertainment will no doubt contribute greatly to this very positive, marketwide trend.

Heck, I’m not even a gamer and I can most definitely see that this market is en route bigger and better things. 2008 and 2009 will bring about developments for Web-connected consumers that really ramp up awareness and interest in the social arena. No more tedious “news” feed tracking of friends to occupy your idle moments. Things are going to get a lot more fun and a lot less exhausting fairly soon.

So I say kudos to Mr Zuckerberg and the folks being Zynga and SGN and all other gaming startups born of the Web 2.0 era. Props for sticking it through this far, and seeing to it that all your ducks have fallen right into line. I can only imagine what the industry will look like in 12-24 months’ time. One thing’s certain. Most all of the names spoken of here will likely be alive and kicking well down the line. There’s many, many years left in this social monster that we’ve all got our eyes transfixed on.

Can anyone argue otherwise today?

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Jangl Sees Big Growth Thanks to Facebook and Bebo Apps

Kristen Nicole — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:22:57 +0000

Jangl has been hard at work integrating its VoIP services into various social networks and applications. Last year Jangl added SMS support, which was also tied in to its integration with existing social networks. Today, Jangl is reporting a 5x increase in the number of signups across Facebook and Bebo alone, with nearly 10x increase in the number of messages exchanged.

What’s this all mean? It means that Jangl’s integration with such large social networks has paid off, handsomely. Giving itself to the platform approach means that users don’t have to leave their networking accounts, and are given a new way in which to connect immediately with other users.

At Jangl’s current growth rate, the company is expecting to see well over 1 million messages sent in March alone. Wanna hear the really bad pun Jangl sent along for this projection in its email? “Call it our Million Message March.” Yeah, Jangl … that was a really bad pun!

To go along with this announcement, Jangl is also releasing updates to its Facebook application, JanglMe.

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Familybuilder Raises $1.5M: New Name, New Money.

Kristen Nicole — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:56:47 +0000

iFamily has shed its Adams Family appearance and taken on a far more friendly persona. Renamed Familybuilder, you may recall that the iFamily (now Familybuilder) application works by looking to your existing network within Facebook in order to connect your actual family tree, letting you begin directly with your own network.

The family-tree building tool has sent over some numbers for its Facebook application, which was launched last summer. Familybuilder is reporting 7 million profiles and 2 million registered users for its Facebook application alone. To continue banking on such application opportunities, Familybuilder is taking its show onto Bebo. Get it here.

The Series A funding didn’t hurt either. The funding amount totals $1.5 million from DN Capital, and this really showcases the fact that we’re seeing a healthy amount of monetary interest in the application space, especially as other services create centralizing systems that span across a number of platforms. Familybuilder’s funding will go towards the expansion of its family tree-building applications across other social networks as well.

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Facebook’s UK Usership Drops. Just Temporary?

Paul Glazowski — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:55:00 +0000

Is Facebook losing steam in the UK? Has the network reached its plateau? Or is a reported dip in user numbers between December ’07 and January ’08 simply seasonal?

The Guardian’s Mark Sweney is reporting today that Facebook - the network that has appeared throughout nearly all of the past 16+ months to have a whopper of a rocket on its back - saw a 5% drop in users in the UK for the past two to three months. This finding arrives from data-crunching labs at Nielsen Online. The market researcher determined also that MySpace observed a similar decline percentage-wise, while Bebo’s numbers fell a good bit less (-2%).

The 5% drop for Facebook translates to a loss of roughly 400,000 users (allowing it to maintain some 8.5 million by January) from the network’s overall activity for a good portion of the winter season. MySpace, though the preeminent network as far as global proportions are concerned, commands a smaller hold of the UK social networking industry than Facebook (presently retaining about 5m uniques), and so its negative figures are less significant. Bebo, the third-largest network in the UK, spent its first 30 days of this year with some 4.1m users in its ranks.

What seems to make this news especially impactful on Facebook is the phenomenal expansion it has shown over the past year and a half. Nielsen claims that the network spent all of 17 months (ending Nov ’07) charting steadfast growth to its peak of nearly 9m users in the UK. Only in the past 60-90 days has the network shown any loss of steam.

How do we interpret this news? Well, it should first be said that there is a fundamental issue to be had with Nielsen Online’s ultra-short-term premise. The problem is with Nielsen’s focus on a very small window of time for its research. The study allowed only for December-January data to be analyzed. And if one were to expand one’s historic perspective to encompass, say, the past 12 months or so, as Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodget and subsequently Nick O’Neill of AllFacebook have done, one will see Facebook’s growth statistic to be “a whopping 712% year over year” when sizing readings for Jan ’07 and ’08 against one another. O’Neill chalks any red tape up to a “seasonal decrease,” nothing more.

We would also be quite surprised to find Facebook document an extended decline through to this year’s spring season. As simplistic and vague as it is to say, winter isn’t the most sociable of quarters for us up here in the colder reaches of the globe. Wait ‘til the numbers for the present month and the next are revealed. When all is said and done, we’re all likely to witness more forward motion from Facebook - and presumably other networks as well - well into the remainder of the year.

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Social Networking: Risks vs. Rewards

Paul Glazowski — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 19:52:39 +0000

Are social networks healthy? That is what is now being asked by an increasing number of analysts today in response to the growing number of violent crimes and suicides related to the world of MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and other sites.

In a so-called “Freakonomics quorum” arranged with six “wise people,” Stephen J. Dubner at The New York Times recently questioned if social networking technology has “made us better or worse off as a society, either from an economic, psychological, or sociological perspective? And in a guest post published earlier today on Center Networks, Matt Harwood picks apart the more basic and straightforward question: “Are social networks responsible for teen suicides?”

The general consensus among all viewpoints expressed in both instances mentioned above is that social networks are on the whole beneficial, but do have their downsides. A summary which I can agree with.

As with most things deemed “newsworthy” in this day and age, anything representative of a negative occurrence or development typically achieves greater notoriety than anything positive. This is true when considering events ranging from the political to the technological and far beyond. So there is something to be said for maintaining a sort of sensible view of things that, upon immediate glance, appear quite shocking. (In some cases, rightly so, I should add.)

What do I mean exactly? Well, on the whole, I can tell you that the stories referencing an alarming number of suicides by young people in a particular region of Wales are very disheartening. They show that the influence of connections made on the Internet can be much more impactful for some individuals than had been widely perceived many years ago. So there is understandably a quest now being undertaken by privacy and health advocates to emphasize caution to network users and push network developers to incorporate into member accounts more powerful monitors and controls to try to remedy the present situation.

But the subjects of convenience and unparalleled user empowerment - in both social and economic senses - that must also be given a fair shake. The good must be measured for what it offers as well as does the bad.

And in the social networking universe, the advantages outweigh the faults. Exploits must be addressed, absolutely. But networks are inherently great devices. Though a percentage of Web users find them useless, redundant, and banal, tens of millions have found such services to expedite tasks - for work or personal purposes - and essentially streamline their lives significantly. There is, after all, something important to saving time and energy. That is what allows for individual and societal advancement.

So, while social networks do need further development to prioritize user happiness and safety, it behooves us to take any disconcerting and unfortunate headlines extracted from the realm of “BeboSpacebook” and hold them in perspective.

Some advise to concerned parents: If the use of social networks online by your children worries you, don’t do the instinctual. Don’t restrict them from those sites. Instead, teach them (as well as yourselves) as much as possible about any and all networks. Knowledge is a fantastic repellant of ignorance and disastrous behavior.

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Bebo Teams with Music Nation to Launch Artists’ Careers

Kristen Nicole — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 13:36:46 +0000

Bebo has tons of users, an open developers platform, support for Facebook apps, and users that are apparently fairly responsive to the new apps. What more could this social network ask for? Well, in deepening its relationships with its users and branching out on more partnership opportunities in order to bring new options to its members, Bebo has teamed up with Music Nation to hold music contests in a new segment called Bebo OnStage.

This will work much like Music Nation’s main site, where users are “pitted” against each other in head-2-head battles, letting the community choose the winner. In offering its service to Bebo, Music Nation gets wider exposure to a global audience, and Bebo gets a ready-made, socially involved tool for engaging users and making itself even more popular by helping an independent artist to launch their career.

For Bebo OnStage, this partnership brings about a wealth of new opportunities for the artists, as the joint effort between Bebo and Music Nation will result in grand prizes like a chance to perform at the SXSW conference next month, and a record deal with Original Signal/Epic Records. This particular contest is the one that’s kicking off Bebo OnStage, with voting beginning on February 11th.

Even with the previous partnerships Bebo has participated in, none have really established the social network as being on the same level as MySpace when it comes to transitioning individuals into a level of stardom. Taking such a focus on music could help Bebo grow in this area, especially as MySpace is ramping up its own efforts to offer original content across its multiple platforms, and has just unveiled its developer platform.

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Bebo’s Application Platform is Actually Doing Well

Stan Schroeder — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 06:55:29 +0000

Bebo is not in the social networking spotlight as often as MySpace and Facebook, but it’s doing a darn good job at always breathing down their necks. A couple of weeks ago Bebo launched its API (compatible with Facebook’s application platform), and as Programmable Web’s data shows, the number of Bebo applications has since been growing in a steep curve.

With a little over 900 applications Bebo is still far from Facebook’s 14,000+ apps, but Facebook’s API has been around much longer. If you look at sheer growth, Bebo is growing at about half the rate of Facebook, which is still a very good result if you consider that Facebook’s API has been a stellar success (although some might argue *cough* me *cough* that most, if not all, apps on the platform are completely useless.)

The entire picture will be much clearer when LinkedIn and MySpace’s app platforms go live, but judging by these results, Bebo might not be the last to cross the finish line here.

[graphs courtesy of Programmable Web]

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Widgetbox Launches App Accelerator for Bebo

Kristen Nicole — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 14:19:31 +0000

Not to be outdone by Gigya’s widget ad network announcement earlier today, Widgetbox has announced its new App Accelerator for Bebo. Widgetbox had already created an App Accelerator for Facebook, making it easy and fast to create applications to be launched on Facebook’s open platform. And while Bebo supports Facebook apps, the social network has also launched a public platform of its own.

Being the second most popular network to launch its own platform so far, it was an obvious choice for Widgetbox to continue to extend its offering of developer tools that work within the widening realm of open platforms. Widgetbox widgets can be converted into applications that work even more intricately with social networks, and its branding becomes all the more far reaching.

Will a more integrated Widgetbox widget ad network, specific to Bebo, follow? Given Widgetbox’s cross-platform approach to integrated widget distribution, the company is able to take on some unique tracking and advertising initiatives that operate on various levels throughout its expanding network. I’m curious to follow the behavioral advertising and marketing research opportunities that Widgetbox and other app creators/widget networks can benefit from with such a wide approach.

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Bebo Platform Opens To The Public

Sean P. Aune — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 01:21:12 +0000

Bebo has opened their platform to all the app developers out there, ending the private development phase.

You can head over to the blog for all the details that make my little non-technical brain go “um… right…”. I do know you can set your apps to different privacy settings so you can work on it live on the site without users accessing it, and a bunch of other stuff that those of us who don’t work on apps don’t understand, but I am sure will excite those of you who do.

(via Bebo blog)

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Car Thieves Use Bebo To Plot Night Of Vanadlism

Sean P. Aune — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 14:30:51 +0000

It seems a group of car thieves in Belfast, Ireland, had been discovered using the social networking service Bebo, a UK favourite, to send coded messages to one another in their planning processes. The latest occurrence took place just before the new year, when coded messages were sent out to let the fellow thieves know where a stash of stolen cars could be found.

The plan involved using the cars to terrorize citizens as they drove around aggressively, causing destruction and narrowly avoiding accidents. This activity has become quite a problem in the Irish town, where gangs have expanded their ranks to include even children as young as 10 or 11.

While a story of kids using social networks to organize a protest of a newly instated kissing law in South Africa is cute in its appeal, as we mentioned earlier today, this one is just an entirely contrary example of how the uses of current technologies can so quickly be turned for detrimental - and in this case damaging - pursuits.

[via Belfast Telegraph]

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