We were all there, screaming to AOL, Yahoo & Microsoft that we need a more personal communication source which encourages a little more self expression. At the very least, when Friendster and Myspace came out to much success around 2003-2004, AIM should have been the first to pick up on this and utilize it’s resources to create it’s own competing social network. Instead, they focused on upgrading their chat platforms, an upgrade that caused everyone to want to revert back to their original AIM versions or run to ichat. Bad call if you ask me.
Because of this late realization, AOL has recently decided to buy the popular UK social networking site, Bebo, for $850 million. Although the Bebo purchase is a little lower then previously rumored, it still shows that AOL believes enough in Bebo and it will be a positive experience for it’s users.
In a statement Thursday, AOL claims Bebo is a “perfect complement to AOL’s personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media.” The other interesting facet is that this also comes at a time when Time Warner is considering splitting its business to part company with it’s AOL unit.
So should all of us AIM users without Bebo accounts rush over and sign up now that it’s part of AOL now? That’s hard to say but it’s probably not a bad idea. Even though the purchase price is relatively lower than social networks have been going for these days, Bebo is still America’s 3rd largest social networking site (9th in the world) with 40 million members, so chances are it will be worth it. Plus there’s always potential that AOL can open up the Bebo platform to developers which could get pretty. There are rumors of “engagement advertising”, but at this point it’s hard to say what this actually means.
Nonetheless, my concerns are:
1. Can AOL make as much money off of Bebo as it’s other inventory?
2. With Bebo out of the playing field, how much more valuable will networks like LinkedIn become?
Alex Burmaster, European Internet Analyst for Nielsen Online, says "Bebo has an incredibly strong brand identity, particularly with the teenage and young adult market, so it will be very interesting to see how AOL makes best use of their new youthful Trojan horse."
Regardless, when is Google going to realize that igoogle is the best social network out there and stop teasing us with Open Social? 
Anthony
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7294174.stm
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080313/100047535.shtml
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8221
