Analysis of recent bebo changes.
Has anyone noticed that Bebo seems to be a bit quiet as of late? With Summer fast approaching, so are the college exams. College students make up, I’m guessing, the majority of the Bebo userbase. In recent weeks I’ve noticed that there aren’t as many messages being forwarded or comments being left on people’s profiles which is no doubt due to the imminent exams, some of which have already started. Once these exams are over, I doubt that Bebo will be able to re-coup the students who used Bebo as a pastime to overcome the boredom of coursework. Neither will they be able to retain those who will be having an active social life throughout the Summer although I reckon some will choose to keep in contact with friends using Bebo. With a massive decrease in the active userbase, it will be interesting to see how Michael Birch and co manage to cope with the inevitable fall in advertising revenue. Maybe some of the 15 staff brought in to moderate pictures and profiles will have to be laid off? Whatever happens, it’s definitely going to be a lot quieter over the next few months.
Recently, YouTube launched a slightly revamped site with a few new features here and there. For this who don’t know, YouTube is a digital video repository where users can upload videos and then share them with their friends. For the past few months, a workaround allowed Bebo users to use videos hosted by YouTube as their flashbox. However, with this recent update, they appear to have fixed this workaround which has rendered many of the most popular flashboxes on Bebo obselete! The Flashbox feature has always been a big Bebo attraction so needless to day, the update dealt a big blow to Bebo users, some of whom may find Bebo less exciting without this ability!
Thankfully Bebo have been busy working on ways to make peoples profiles more unique and have struck a goldmine with their user-submitted skins. I don’t use the word goldmine lightly either! By allowing users to submit their own skins they will save money on having to hire graphic designers to develop skins for them as well as ensuring that there will be an almost endless amount of skins for users to choose from in the future. This is one of the many advantages that Bebo has over MySpace in that skins are just a one click job. It looks good and is an excellent idea on behalf of Michael Birch and co.
To summarise, I think that the hype of Bebo is dying down. The next few months will paint a realistic picture of Bebos actual popularity which I predict won’t be as impressive as others many think. They have been making efforts to innovate their site, however, as time goes on they will find it progressively more difficult to innovate for a wider userbase which will result in the decline of Bebo. When will this happen? I can’t say right now, but we need only look at the social networking sites of the past that have declined in recent months due to Bebo for us to come to the conclusion that soon another site will come a long and take the internet by storm!
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- 09.05.06 / 8pm
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