BELFAST TELEGRAPH -- Dec 10 -- Bebo was the most popular web search this
year, while Facebook was the fastest rising search. Nasza klasa, a
polish social networking, was also a fast rising search in Ireland. FULL ARTICLE @ BELFAST TELEGRAPH
ADOTAS -- Dec 10 -- Bebo announced plans to pump up revenue by
leveraging AOL's IM users to use Bebo's Social Inbox – a content
aggregator that provides users with access to email from Yahoo, Google,
AOL and more; feeds from outside sites like Twitter and YouTube and a
tool that recommends TV shows, online videos and music based on user
data, the Journal reports. FULL ARTICLE @ ADOTAS
TECH CRUNCH -- Dec 10 -- Bebo has integrated direct access to AOL,
Yahoo and Gmail email accounts, as well as a feed reader. Bebo also
fully integrated the Social Thing activity tracker (AOL acquired Social
Thing in August 2008), and is adding content that you may like based on
a new content recommendation engine that the team has built from the
ground up. The Social Thing integration is an excellent way to track
your friends. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH
MASHABLE -- Oct 10 -- SocialCalendar
is a Facebook and Bebo application that manages your social activities, birthdays, parties and
appointments. The app doesn't just list scheduled dates of events,
but actually allows you and the other people involved to collaborate on
the best time and date that works for everyone's schedule. This reduces
the need for excessive emails and phone calls back and forth. There's also a wish list feature (from Amazon) that lets you know
what presents others want. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE
CNET NEWS -- Sep 25 -- According to Hitwise, Facebook's traffic is up
50% in the U.S. since last August. The same numbers say that MySpace
still owns 67.5% of the SN market in the U.S. Facebook has gone
from a market share of under 14% to slightly over 20% in
the past year. MySpace, meanwhile, has seen a 10% decline in
visits, which has pulled its share of the sector down from over 75%
last year. Behind Facebook and MySpace, Hitwise found that the third,
fourth,
and fifth most popular social networks in the U.S. are MyYearbook,
Tagged, and the AOL-owned Bebo. None of them, however, has yet to bring
in more than 2% of the U.S. market share. FULL ARTICLE @ CNET NEWS
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MASHABLE -- Sep 9 -- 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 through Bebo's open
media platform. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE
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TECH CRUNCH -- Aug 28 -- In 2006 Yahoo was unable to close a transaction with Facebook, despite being willing to pay up to $1.62 billion. Nor could they pull the trigger on a $1 billion Bebo deal. Now Yahoo has shut down Mash, which launched less than a year ago. Mash will be shutting down on September 29, 2008. FULL ARTICLE @ WASHINGTON POST
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SOCIAL TIMES -- Aug 20 -- Bebo is one of the few networks that realizes
it's a media company. While MySpace has announced a music service and
imeem has expanded their dominance in social music, Bebo has been
focusing on distributing original content. Today Bebo announced the
launch of Model.Live. This new show is sponsored by Express and will
air on Vogue.TV and Bebo. FULL ARTICLE @ SOCIAL TIMES
PRESS RELEASE -- Aug 20 -- MocoSpace, the mobile social network, announced the addition of Bebo's first employee and board member, and current angel investor, Jim Scheinman to its board of directors. Scheinman pioneered and shaped the social networking space as an early employee of Friendster and the first employee of Bebo.
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HERALD -- Aug 14 -- Bebo, has been accused of racism and 'glorifying
terrorism.' Calls for a controversial quiz to be removed from the site came
this week when Northern Ireland's Culture Minister described its content as
"offensive." Constructed by one of the sites users, the quiz was aimed
at determining users' levels of Irish nationalism. While many questions were
simple in their connotations asking, 'Who was Brian Boru?', 'How many counties
are there in Ireland?' or 'What is the Irish language?' many more were deemed
highly unsuitable. FULL ARTICLE @ HERALD
TECH CRUNCH -- Aug 12 -- Even though Facebook is now the largest social network
in the world,—with 132m unique visitors in June—it is also still
the fastest growing. According to figures compiled by comScore, Facebook's
visitor growth is up 153% on an annual basis. This compares to anemic 3% growth
for MySpace. Other social networks showing strong global growth include Hi5
(100 %) and Friendster (50%), Orkut and Bebo fall in at 41% and 32% growth,
respectively. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH
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C NET NEWS -- Aug 4 -- Bebo along with the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics of the Russian Academy of Science, has created a project called A message from Earth, which will beam 500 messages, generated by members, to a planet orbiting the star Gliese 581c. Apparently this is the nearest planet that might have water, and thus might have life. The beaming will take place October 9 and will take 4.5 hours to arrive. No word yet on how the planet’s occupants will sign up for Bebo. FULL ARTICLE @ C NET NEWS
INC.COM -- July 30 -- Bebo's founders talk about selling their
three-year-old company to AOL for a $850m and what they plan to do
next. After paying off their investors, Birch and his wife and
business partner, Xochi, pocketed more than $500m.
Q: How did the sale come about?
Michael: We'd been approached
by various companies, and we'd always said no. The combination of
AOL's strong presence in the U.S. and its product AIM made us think that AOL and
Bebo could feed off each other.
Q: Many people were surprised that AOL paid $850 million for Bebo. Were you?
Xochi: With our growth in the U.K. and
position in the U.S., we wouldn't have let the business go for less.
Q: Do you worry that some of Bebo's employees might feel that you sold too soon?
Xochi: I believe the employees
were happy with the deal and what they received from it.
Q: Why is Bebo big in Britain but not in the U.S.?
Michael: We entered a very competitive market in the
U.S., whereas only maybe 10% of our target market in the U.K.
was using social networks when we started.
Q: Did you worry about lagging too far behind Facebook and MySpace in the U.S. in terms of traffic?
Xochi: For us to go from
nowhere to where we are now, we think we hit our goals.
Q: This was your sixth business in nine years. Did those earlier businesses inspire Bebo?
Michael:
We definitely came away wiser from one venture to the next. Xochi and I
started doing websites in 1999. Three of them folded, and three were
successful. One of them was a social network Ringo,
which we sold in 2003 for a few million because we were having some
financial problems.
Xochi: It
was really a difficult time for us. We were broke.
Q: What was the biggest mistake you made with Bebo?
Xochi: We
were too slow to hire in the early days.
Q: What's next?
Michael: The current plan is to take a couple
of years off. I want to
contribute to a nonprofit venture in the U.K. and encourage more
entrepreneurship there. And I'll do more angel investing and advising.
Xochi: I'll do more angel investing, too.
Q: Have you bought any toys since the deal closed?
Xochi:
We bought a silver Mercedes-Benz S-Class AMG and a black Land Rover Defender.
FULL ARTICLE @ INC.COM
READ WRITE WEB -- July 29 -- Online reputation company Rapleaf has released a new study of 49 million people, revealing gender and age data about social network users. On most of the main social networks - including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 - women outnumber men by a considerable amount. On Facebook, the 18-24 age group is largest, with 1,685,029 women in that age group compared to 977,753 men. In MySpace, the same age group dominates, with 7,091,214 women and 5,226,788 men. The only social networks studied that didn't have more women than men in the 18-24 year old group were LinkedIn and Perfspot. FULL ARTICLE @ READ WRITE WEB
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BRAND REPUBLIC -- July 23 -- Facebook dominates UK social networking
with 45% of the market. According to Hitwise this is an 188% increase
compared with a year ago. Bebo.com is ranked second by Hitwise with a
market share of 25%.
In the US it is ranked 5th with just over 1% of market share down 41%
on last year. MySpace.com is ranked third with a market share of 15%.
Together, the big three social networks account for just over
85% of the UK SN market leaving only scraps for smaller
rivals. FULL ARTICLE @ BRAND REPUBLIC
Mark Brooks: Will the market fragment, or will the big boys
continue to own and build market share? The short answer is both!
Users will use the majors, and niche sites, in unison. As they become
more sophisticated, and as other niche sites come into existence they
will be lured into using niche sites in combination with the likes of
MySpace, I think. What do you think? Your comments please?
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GUARDIAN.CO.UK -- July 9 -- Orange has launched a major push for mobile social networking in the UK today, introducing a service which aggregates users' accounts across the major social networks. Launched as a trial in France last month under the name MySocialPlace, Orange has now partnered with the biggest social networks - Facebook, MySpace and Bebo - to introduce the service in the UK under the Orange World branded website. UK users can also access the chat service Flirtomatic and the photo-sharing site Pikeo, while Orange customers in France can use the Skyrock community, DailyMotion video site and dating service Meetic. Data from Nielsen Mobile in May showed that 44% of UK mobile phone users have registered with a social networks, and estimated that 1.7% of users, or 812,000 people, had accessed those services from their mobile. Facebook had been accessed by 9% of all mobile web users, MySpace by 3.4% and Bebo by 2.6%. FULL ARTICLE @ GUARDIAN.CO.UK
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TELEGRAPH.CO.UK -- July 9 -- Teenage
gun and knife crime is being glamourised on Bebo, despite the violent
deaths of 19 young people in London this
year. The
knife crime epidemic has forced the
Metropolitan police to make fighting blades their number one priority.
Pictures like these are a shocking indication of how knives have
become part of society and many children's lives. Bebo, which has 11.9m
UK profiles, has frozen the profiles of these users. FULL ARTICLE @ TELEGRAPH.CO.UK
MASHABLE -- June 27 -- Genealogy
tool Familybuilder (formerly known as iFamily), has reached an
important milestone - 16m profiles built within its network.
Having launched a year ago today as a Facebook application,
Familybuilder has spread to a number of other networks like Bebo and
Orkut. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE
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TECH CRUNCH -- June 23 -- Facebook, Bebo and LinkedIn are worth $15 billion, $850 million and $1
billion, respectively. The last valuation of MySpace was
just $580 million, back in 2005 when it was acquired by News Corp. An effective way
to value SNS is based on the average Internet advertising
spend per person in the country they live in. MySpace would be
by far the most valuable social network based on available data. A
competitor like Orkut is worth only 1/20th of MySpace, even though it
has nearly 1/4 the number of users. Second place Facebook has just 75% of the value of MySpace
(even though it now has more users), followed by Bebo (26% of MySpace
value), Hi5 and Amebio. LinkedIn comes in at no. 11, at 6% of MySpace's
value. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH
Mark Brooks: LinkedIn has a more valuable audience per user. Orkut and Friendster and others are sleepers. They have significant foreign audiences (Brazil and Phillipines, respectively) where the online ad markets are still emerging.
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POCKET LINT -- June 19 -- T-Mobile in UK has added Bebo and Piczo to its My Social Sites service. My Social Sites is a mobile application that allows users to stay in touch with their friends and upload pictures from their mobile phone direct to the sites. Charges are 5p to post a comment, send a message or accept a friend request or 20p to add a photo. Users can also search for friends, browse profiles and check out photos for 20p for 24 hour access. FULL ARTICLE @ POCKET LINT
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