Adams Rants

Over two years a go - in fact, 2 years and four months a go - I was “barred” from using the PC in the house “because my eyes would go square!”. Of course, I found a way to get my daily internet fix and in this time started using the upstart social networking site Bebo, which at the time had a small userbase and had little features. Bebo has since grown to become the largest social network in Ireland, and one of the largest in the world and has recently been acquired by AOL for the princely sum of $850m! Not bad for a site that only two years ago was struggling to make it’s mark, hidden amongst a vast array of “MySpace Clones!”.

Two years and four months a go, I noticed a blatant security and privacy flaw on Bebo. In fact, I blogged about it at the time and it received a lot of attention, doing the rounds on all the social-bookmarking sites which were also growing in popularity. In fact, A search for “Bebo” on Google ranked my blog first! The end result of my lobbying was that Bebo created a two-tier friendship system which is now known as Direct Friends and Indirect Friends. Direct Friends see your contact details, indirect friends don’t! A simple, but pivotal change in what was to be Bebos’ rise to the top of the social networking ladder!

Michael Birch said it on my blog that Bebo was initially a contact sharing website but had morphed into a full-scale social networking site like MySpace. By implementing the necessary changes needed to ensure that only direct friends could see your contact details, Bebo allowed themselves to target and explore new markets, now as a social networking site! Bebo soon rose in popularity thanks to its ease of use, speed, reliability and the fact that it was something new - a change from MySpace.

Bebo then started making headlines worldwide, but for all the wrong reasons. With a lack of political scandals, Bebo appeared on RTEs PrimeTime. All the stories worldwide focused on the common sight of pornography and underage drinking, but I often wonder had I not inspired the changes to the site, how the media would have reacted to being readily being able to get the contact details of teenagers! Bebo got lucky in that when the spotlight swung their way, they weren’t standing there in their underwear and had implemented just enough changes to avoid being totally torn apart by the media!

Having successfully negotiated the hurdle that is the media circus, Bebo started to make a drive to the top. Firstly they introduced skins and while they were initially thin on the ground, they finally allowed users to customise their page in a one click process. They then expanded this to allow for user created skins which had to be accepted by Bebo themselves. This ensured that a small quantity of high quality skins became available but skins were slow to be released and people slanted towards the same type of skins meaning that soon everybody’s page started to look the same again! This all changed when Bebo allowed any member to release skins! Granted, the quality of the skins has dropped like a stone but now there’s no shortage of user-created content and if you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can follow a simple tutorial and have your own within minutes! I even made my own!

Once Bebo introduced skins, they followed in the footsteps of MySpace and launched Bebo Bands. It initially boasted a small selection of relatively unknown bands, some were pretty good, some were awful. Some would argue that it hasn’t taken off at all, but its constantly growing as bands and record labels realise that an exclusive presence on the dominant MySpace simply isn’t enough! Bebo then tried their hand at becoming a place for authors to showcase their work. It got the support of a few mainstream authors but I got the feeling that Bebo was trying too hard to be too many things! In the end, Bebo Authors became an outlet for depressed teenagers poetry and much like the themes in the said poems, Bebo Authors died a slow death.

Interestingly, while MySpace had an open development community for widgets, Bebo decided to close theirs. At least initially. Whereas on MySpace anyone could theoretically create an application for their homepage, Bebo required developers, usually big advertisers, to pay for exclusivity. While this was like printing money for them, it deviated from the trend that was towards being driven by user-created content. Some could argue that having closed development was a good thing as it meant that users pages weren’t cluttered with nonsensical widgets and those that were there, served a valid purpose! Bebo have since released their development kit and now pages are filled with widget after widget. It may be annoying to have to navigate through widget infested profiles, but at the end of the day it’s what people want and Bebo have met this demand!

So, of everything I’ve just mentioned, what’s my feature introduced to Bebo? I’m going to be a bit strange and say the visitor tracking map! It’s not that I want to keep tabs on who’s checking up on me, but I think Bebo hit the nail on the head as it satisfies our curiousity and tackles a security issue too!

Where will Bebo go in the future? I posted by own outlook of the future of social networking two years a go and was totally wrong, so I’m not even going to guess!