bebo

With dual announcements in New York and London on Tuesday, social networking site Bebo unveiled its "Open Media" platform, a way for media brands to build a presence in the community with music and video content.

Think of it as a sort of hybrid between MySpace's MySpaceTV portal and Facebook's new "pages" for companies. It's an "open platform" that can be joined without licensing agreements and charges no fee to content providers, but it's limited to entertainment content like video and music. According to a release from the company, this … Read more

Social-networking site Bebo, which has made its most significant inroads among young people in the United Kingdom, is set to announce that it has joined Google's OpenSocial project, joining the ranks of MySpace.com, Imeem, LinkedIn, Six Apart, and a laundry list of other participants that seems to encompass any social-networking site that isn't Facebook.

Additionally, Bebo plans to soon release an application programming interface (API) later this year that will "enable Facebook developers to easily bring their applications to the Bebo community," a Bebo representative said Thursday. It's not yet clear what this really … Read more

I came across a very disturbing social networking site last week called Yuwie. It's another site that's decided that for some reason, using a free, and highly functional social service populated by your friends (like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc.) is worth ditching for something built with very little ease of use or original design, but created to help you make ludicrous amounts of money by selling out your friends.

It works like this: you get a share of money for every page view on the service (the site makes its money by selling ads). Also, the more people visit your page, the more page views you get a percentage of. Yuwie then takes it a step further with referrals, letting you get a percentage of money from the activity of any friends you've invited to the service, along with their friends, and people who their friends have invited. This goes on for 10 "levels," so you could theoretically have close to 100,000 referrals if your friends and their invitees continue to invite others who use the service beyond the one-month probation period.

Does this idea sound familiar? It's a pyramid scheme. The problem with this, economically, is that it's unsustainable. The people at the top can't possibly pay out the promised amount, and the people stuck at the bottom aren't getting the same benefits as those who have spammed referrals to their friends higher up in the chain. Speaking of spam, even if you're on there with your friends, you're bound to get an intolerable amount of spam from people you don't know as the service grows. The second most popular group on the service at the moment has been specifically designed as a place to add random groups of other folks to beef up your bonus money. Is this the kind of network you want to be a part of? At least the site isn't asking for a sign-up fee--if it did, it'd be illegal. And it ought to be.

The worst part is that Yuwie is pretty much a carbon copy of MySpace, circa two years ago, with nearly identical profile features--meaning you're not really getting anything more than you would with a mainstream social network.… Read more

Social-networking site Bebo announced on Thursday that it has struck a deal with AIM, AOL's instant-messaging arm. Through this partnership, users of either service can now easily invite friends to the other.

More specifically, Bebo users who have provided the site with their AIM usernames will now see an AIM icon displayed on their profiles so that other members can click on it to IM them directly through Bebo's interface. There's also a new "AIM Friend Finder" in Bebo so that members can invite the denizens of their AIM buddy lists to join Bebo, as … Read more

FreeWebs has officially launched the WYSIWYG Site Builder tool we blogged about last month. In short, it lets anyone build a site without any knowledge of HTML, or having to refresh the page to see changes. The service soft-launched the tool early last week, and I took it for a spin this morning.

Site Builder emulates a desktop app, with a small floating tool bar, and context-sensitive menus that will serve up different actions depending on what tool you're using. For example, if you've inserted an image, the menu will give you options to align it with text, … Read more

Social networking site Bebo, with a 36-million-strong member base centered primarily in the U.K., announced Tuesday that it has partnered with Microsoft on a new instant messaging initiative. The Windows Live Messenger service, formerly known as MSN Messenger, is now the fuel behind Bebo's new internal IMing operations.

Bebo users who have hooked their Windows Live usernames up to the service have an "IM Me" button on their profiles that they can use to communicate with other members in-browser if they're online, but Bebo's IM is also open to members without Windows Live Messenger. … Read more

New research from the mobile-focused statistics firm M:Metrics has focused on exactly how many mobile-phone customers are using their handsets to access social networks and blogs, and the results aren't particularly surprising: not a whole lot of people are.

In the month of June, a total of only 12.3 million mobile consumers in the United States and Western Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom) accessed a social-networking site or blog on their phones at least once. In the U.K., this came out to a total of only 2.5 percent of mobile users; … Read more

Some interesting ComScore numbers have just been documented by CNET's sister site ZDNet: social-networking site Bebo, always more of a presence in the U.K. than stateside, has soared ahead of global leader MySpace on its home turf. In the month of July, the ComScore statistics say, Bebo logged 10.7 million unique visitors in the U.K. and MySpace trailed with 10.1.

This marks the first time that ComScore's statistics have shown Bebo ahead of MySpace. And it should be noted that these pertain to unique visitors, not registered users or page views.

In third place, … Read more