Since Bebo hit the headlines at the beginning of the year, many people wondered did it have what it took to be a giant-killer and overcome the major opposition in the form of the Rupert Murdoch controlled MySpace.
Over the past few months, very little in the way of groundbreaking features were introduced over at MySpace, however they did have the support of bands which, I feel, are vital to the survival of any of the social networking sites that we’ve seen come and go over the past year or so. MySpace seemed to be concentrating on tightening up their security measures after a string of recent bad publicity that the site has been involved in. Thanks, partly, to my findings, Bebo already had tightened up it’s security to a satisfactory level which allowed it to develop what are known as “killer-features”, such as their Skins system and optimising their Flashbox feature (which is now called “Bebo TV”). But now, and only now have they released their latest feature which puts them in a superb position to compete with MySpace.
The Bebo Bands feature was added a mere 15 hours a go and even though I’m not in a band, I’ve had the chance to play around with it over the past while. It’s not too dis-similar to MySpaces offering, however, like everything on Bebo, it’s looks much cleaner and won’t be subject to error messages every 15 mins ala MySpace. A band profile page takes on the same layout as a normal Bebo profile and therefore bands have access to the wide range of user created skins. They can even create one themselves and offer it up to other users and all through the Bebo site as opposed to unreliable third party sites. Of course it also has band related features such as a Song Module, where people can stream songs, an Album module, where we can look at the tracklisting of their albums as well as the artwork. There’s also a groupie module which works like the Top 16 does and a tour date module where people can check out details about their latest tours. There are also the usual modules on the page such as Bebo TV where a band can stream a video to you and the blog block where the band can share their experiences with their groupies.
It will be interesting to see how MySpace react to this and whether or not they can come up with anything ground breaking in response because given the unreliable nature of MySpace, the bands feature was the only thing that has kept many users loyal to Rupert Murdoch! If Bebo Bands takes off, and I think it will, then we could very well see MySpace being sold on at a considerable loss!
