AOL/Bebo Buy Could Create Second-Largest Social Platform

In a move that should help them secure a bigger slice of the social networking world, AOL has entered into an agreement to purchase social platform Bebo. The social platform boasts 40 million unique users worldwide; once joined with AOL's AIM and ICQ systems AOL that number will grow to 80 million uniques.

With 80 million unique users, the AOL/Bebo baby will be larger than Facebook (67 million uniques) but still smaller than MySpace.

What exactly is AOL getting?

According to comScore, Bebo is one of the fastest growing social networks with 688% growth from January 2007 to January 2008. Facebook showed only 11% growth and MySpace 8% growth during the same period. Though their total unique users are much fewer than MySpace or Facebook, Bebo users spend more time in the social space. Bebo users spent 217 minutes in the social space in January while Facebook users spent 198 minutes and MySpace users spent only 156 minutes.

HitWise found that Bebo was the fourth most popular social platform following MySpace, Facebook and MyYearbook in February 2008. More than 80% of Bebo traffic for February was return traffic. In the UK, Bebo is the brand most searched for, leading both Ebay and Facebook.

Looking ahead into 2008, Bebo has plans to launch social platforms in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. AOL, also, has announced plans to spread their social wings a bit more with some reporting that the company plans to expand into 30 more countries by 2009.


by Kristina Knight
bizreport.com

AOL buys social network Bebo for $850 million

In an unexpected move, AOL has acquired social-networking site Bebo. The price tag: $850 million in cash.

Rumors had floated over the past few months that Bebo, which has over 40 million members, was up for sale. Reports suggested a $1 billion price tag, but there were few hints as to potential buyers. Though Bebo had already partnered with AOL's AIM messaging client to facilitate friend-invite interoperability between the two services, even the most creative blogger speculation didn't seem to point to AOL eventually buying the social network.

Ironically, AOL itself has been talked about as an acquisition target. Jeffrey Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner, which operates AOL, has spoken recently about plans to spin off or sell divisions of the company.

AOL has made it clear that buying Bebo is a move geared toward international growth, as the youth-oriented social network is wildly popular in the U.K., Ireland, and New Zealand. AOL reported that it has launched "17 international web sites over the last year and has plans to expand to 30 countries outside the U.S. by the end of 2008," as well as international versions of its home page and some services. Bebo, meanwhile, plans to launch five localized versions of its service this year (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands), and AOL will make it a major part of the company's international expansion strategy.

"Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL's personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media," said AOL chairman and CEO Randy Falco in a statement. "What drew us to Bebo was its substantial and fast-growing worldwide user-base, its vision of a truly social web, and the monetization opportunities...This positions us to offer advertisers even greater reach and marketers significant insights into the desires and needs of consumers."

Additionally, despite the fact that performance monitoring firms have pegged it as sluggish, Bebo's technology was likely appealing to AOL. The social network's developer platform supports both OpenSocial and Facebook applications; it also has an "Open Media" platform for audio and video content from big-media names like CBS and MTV as well as online production outlets like Next New Networks and Ustream. AOL, meanwhile, has opened up AIM to developers.

In a conference call on Thursday, Falco and Ron Grant, AOL's president and COO, as well as Bebo president Joanna Shields, said that integration between Bebo and AOL's AIM and ICQ messaging properties will be crucial. Combined, they said, AOL will own a "social graph" of 80 million people, bigger than the 67 million that the independently-run Facebook currently counts but still significantly smaller than News Corp.'s MySpace.com.

"The distribution aspect of linking up with AIM and ICQ is an extraordinary opportunity for us," Shields said in the conference call.

Still, at the core, the Bebo acquisition is all about the advertising. It comes at a time when AOL is still struggling to make the transition to a leader in online advertising after amassing nearly $1 billion worth in acquisitions--Tacoda, Buy.at, Quigo, and AdTech, to name a few--into its Platform-A ad network, as well as social-media buys like Goowy. Bebo, like most other social-networking sites, relies on ad revenue, and as projections claim that social-media ad buys will keep rising (eMarketer predicts 75 percent year over year), AOL undoubtedly wants a piece of the pie.

But it's still an uphill climb for AOL. Just this week, the company confirmed that Platform-A president Curt Viebranz was departing the company amid a management shakeup.

Joanna Shields, president of the San Francisco-based Bebo, will continue to run the social network and will report to Ron Grant. The deal was brokered on AOL's side by Bank of America Securities and Deutsche Bank Securities. Bebo had hired investment bank Allen & Co. when it opted to put itself up for sale.

Grant estimated in Thursday's conference call that the deal will ideally be complete within a month.

Is social networking a waste of time?

timesonline.co.uk

There has been much fuss of late over the loss of productivity brought on by employees multi-tasking between actual work and social networking. One estimate puts the cost to British industry at £6.5 billion per annum in lost productivity and questionable bandwidth usage. Another survey estimates that Britain’s social media fanatics are spending as much as 12 hours per week on these sites, no doubt eating into valuable work time.

But what is the impact of this collective Facebook/MySpace/Bebo addiction on high school and university students, our bright future? A new survey this week by IT specialists Global Secure Systems, (the ones who took a look at the impact on businesses and arrived at the £6.5 billion figure), says students are also guilty of sneaking in a fair bit of social networking during the school day.

In their survey of 500 English school children between the ages of 13 and 17, 51 per cent confess to checking their social network profiles during lessons. Over a quarter admit their in-school daily social network fix exceeds over 30 minutes each day.

If this sounds surprising, you haven’t been to school lately. Laptop-toting school kids are the norm these days, as are Wifi-enabled campuses. And when the laptop is in the locker, there are net-enabled smart phones at the ready. Add to the equation the rocket-fast texting ability of your typical 16-year-old and you get an explosion of social networking opportunities at the most unlikely points in the school day.

No educator would knowingly allow such a distraction in their classroom, and yet it appears to be happening right under their noses. It’s hard enough getting the PlayStation generation to focus for even a half-hour on a lecture of, say, King John and the Magna Carta. Try competing with the latest lunchroom gossip being broadcasted to mobiles, Facebook and Twitter. The significance of establishing modern-day democracy pales in comparison.

Before you shake your head and mutter something starting with the phrase “In my day…”, admit it – how many of you have shirked off work on an important business project to tend to a personal email, text or, these days, a Facebook query? How many of you have done it today? How many of you are doing it now?

We adults might regard tidying up our profile, sending messages to friends or contacts, joining the odd (or oddball) group or participating in a movie knowledge quiz to be a harmless distraction, the kind of thing that keeps us sane during the workday. (While writing this column, I have been twice drawn to my Facebook profile to attend to small matters, but that’s it. No more for me today. Okay, maybe after lunch.) But teens are deadly serious about social networks. For them, failing to attend to these duties could end friendships, sink reputations and mean missed opportunities to climb the fickle and precarious social ladder of young adulthood. I say we ought to go easy on them if they are neglecting some of their responsibilities while they fuss around with their online persona.

As a university lecturer at John Cabot University in Rome I encourage my students, all in their early twenties, to embrace social media and every other Web 2.0 application out there. Yes, posting photos of you and your semi-clad friends boozing it up late at night could sink your chances with a prospective employer, who will no doubt be snooping around for this very type of incriminating evidence. But the good far outweighs the bad. I encourage the students to be creative, to promote our online student newspaper, which just over a year from launch is pulling in steadily rising traffic. No doubt all the blog, Facebook and MySpace mentions are helping. I’ve had students who use social networking sites to build and promote projects on fighting poverty and eradicating hunger, organising music gigs, art and photo exhibitions, plus coordinating meet-ups for political rallies.

I admire the growing number of young students who dedicate hours to designing complicated widgets and applications too. Yes, they’re probably neglecting their history paper to complete it, but the end product is a far more valuable lesson learned in creativity, courage and computer coding. When I look at all the creativity, the collaboration and the activism being generated in these networks, I am hopeful for the future. Perhaps it is we educators who need to learn how to harness this power into our everyday classroom lessons.

_______________

Bernhard Warner, a freelance journalist and media consultant, writes about technology, the internet and media industries.

Are Social Networks Responsible for Teen Suicides?

Within the past year, the area surrounding town of Bridgend in Wales has been rocked with no less than 14 young people taking their own lives. In the past days, two more suicides of young people living in the area have been reported.

Deep in to each article about this growing trend are often paragraphs mentioning each lost teenager were part of the Bebo social network, and knew each other. This, coupled with the geographical location, has lead to fears of a suicide pact, or secret organisation where members take their own life for fame.

The story is distressing to many that have never even been to Wales, but for those interested in social media, the Bebo angle, plus the fame aspect, is a trend that I do not believe should be ignored.

I have always been of the opinion that it is the person using the tool, not the tool itself, that is the issue - akin to the phrase "Guns don't kill people, people kill people". I am still of this view, vehemently, and so would argue against anyone Bebo, if indeed it's offerings have been used in any way in this tragedy. Certainly in this tragic case, you cannot argue this is a widespread phenomenon.

Many reports of the British press have mentioned eulogy websites for those that have died, some suggesting their social network profiles of kind messages of sympathy are part of the young people's motivation for suicide. That either dedicated sites, or existing profile pages, are filled with messages that maybe they feel haven't been given whilst alive. A permanent memory of them - fame.

Some would say, especially right-wing press here in Britain, that social networks (or the entire internet) needs policing, and monitoring. They will howl that any tool used in freedom by young people will poison them. Even if the only evidence for such measures is extremely rare cases such as this.

I cannot agree with them, maybe you do? Maybe the fact that most social networking applications are used by a young, vulnerable, impressionable demographic urges you to consider its true merits, taking in to account possible downsides.

Please leave your thoughts in the comments. I would also like to extend my heart-felt sympathies to all those involved in these tragic and unfair circumstances.

Matt Harwood
mattharwood.co.uk

Social Networks Still Growing Strong

Stats to be released tomorrow by comScore show that traffic to most of the top social networking sites is continuing to increase in the US, although the amount of time users spend on such sites is leveling off. For example, while MySpace is showing 11.6% year-to-year growth in unique visitors and Facebook is up 78.6%, the amount of time the average user spends on each site is down 10.4% and up just 1.1%, respectively. Further, the average time spent on Bebo is off 63.6%, though the US is only a small part of that social network’s user base.

Looking closer at the engagement metrics, it’s notable that MySpace users still spend the most time on the site versus users of other social networks. In January, the average visitor spent 203.9 minutes on the site (a 13.7% month-to-month increase), while the average Facebook visitor was logged on for 172.1 minutes (a 1.6% month-to-month increase, but notably down from a high of 199.9 minutes per visitor in February ’07).

The decline in minutes per user on Facebook certainly adds more credence to the theory that interest in applications is starting to fall off. Meanwhile, a few Facebook-like additions such as a friend news feed and improved photo galleries seem to be keeping users on MySpace as the top social network prepares to launch its own developer platform to users next month.

A few other notable numbers from the report:

* YouTube unique visitors more than doubled in the past year, to 61.3 million visitors in January. Page views were up 277%.
* Flickr unique visitors were up 88.5% to nearly 14 million. Page views were up 266% year-over-year to 340 million in January.
* Yahoo 360 unique visitors plunged 53.4% to 2.2 million. Page views were down 54.6% to 52 million.
* Unique visitors to Facebook fell 2.3% from December. They are essentially flat since August (33.7 million, versus 33.8 million for January).

Clearly, YouTube is benefiting from being acquired by Google and integrated into search results, while Flickr is continuing to grow under the Yahoo umbrella. As for Yahoo 360, its demise probably doesn’t come as a huge surprise given Yahoo’s ever-shifting social networking strategy.

mashable.com

Companies Warned Not to Rush Into Social Networking

Many companies are thinking about how they can take advantage of social-networking technology, but analysts at Gartner are warning against getting caught up in the hype.

Businesses are advised to consider certain issues before investing in or developing internal social-networking tools. These include protecting personal intellectual property, as well as people's preference for using existing nonprofessional, external networks such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace.com.

With Facebook saying it will license its developer platform to other organizations, it also could become even easier for companies to develop their own social networks.

But the Gartner report says the hype around social networking doesn't necessarily mean it's a mature enough technology to make it a critical business requirement.

There is also little evidence that social networking will be as beneficial for businesses as other Web-based communications technology, such as instant messaging.

Ultimately, Gartner suggests, the value of social-networking technology comes from content rather than the product itself. The analysts recommend that IT departments think very carefully before committing to expensive "social-networking white elephants."

Earlier this month, business networking site LinkedIn also said it will let third parties develop applications for its site and take LinkedIn content to other sites.

Tim Ferguson of Silicon.com reported from London