DavePress

Here’s an interesting development: AOL have announced the purchase of social network Bebo for $850 million in cash. Previous coverage didn’t even mention AOL as a potential buyer.

From BusinessWire:

With a total membership of more than 40 million worldwide, Bebo is a global social media network which combines community, self-expression and entertainment to enable its users to consume, create, discover and share content. Bebo is one of the leading social networks in the UK, and is ranked number one in Ireland and New Zealand, and number three in the U.S. Its users are heavily engaged and view an average of 78 pages per usage day. Bebo has approximately 100 employees operating in offices in the UK, San Francisco and Austin, TX.

The deal comes just one week after AOL’s launch of Open AIM 2.0, an initiative that allows the developer community greater freedom to access the AIM network and integrate AIM into its sites and applications, and the announcement by Apple of a downloadable AIM application for the iPhone.

Under the terms of the agreement, AOL will acquire Bebo for $850 million in cash.

“Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL’s personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media,” said Randy Falco, Chairman and CEO, AOL. “What drew us to Bebo was its substantial and fast-growing worldwide user-base, its vision of a truly social web, and the monetization opportunities that leverage Platform-A across our combined global audience. This positions us to offer advertisers even greater reach and marketers significant insights into the desires and needs of consumers.”

Allen Stern at CentreNetworks:

What does this mean for AOL? It brings their ad inventory for Platform-A skyrocketing upwards with a youth and young adult demographic. This is a good complement to their current AOL properties which tend to tick a bit further up the age chain. AOL also announced last month the launch of 20+ Web sites in 2008.

Search Engine Journal:

Bebo is based out of the UK, San Francisco and Texas and has become the social network of choice among British Internet users and those in commonwealths, being the #1 social network in Ireland and New Zealand.

With 40 milllion worldwide members, Bebo will introduce a new outlet for AOL’s Platform-A behavioral driven advertising, AOL search and AOL properties to grow in conjunction with (Bebo is currently a Yahoo advertising partner).

Will post up more coverage as it comes in.

Updates:

Om Malik:

The deal also shows the schizophrenic nature of my former employer, Time Warner. Jeff Bewkes wants to get rid of AOL (and Time Warner Cable) and focus entirely on his old Hollywood style businesses. Earlier this week he was happy to talk deal with Yahoo and get rid of AOL, which is going to through a major crisis, as reported by several other outlets. And at the same time they are spending $850 million in cash on Bebo. Maybe it helps AOL become a more sexy acquisition, or a spin-off candidate?

Charles Arthur in The Guardian:

But now the question is - as it always is - has AOL bought just after the wave has broken? News Corp’s acquisition of MySpace initially looked like a mistake, but now seems sensible. Do AOL and Bebo make a match made in heaven… or hell? After all, AOL’s tried an old-world merger. Now it seems it’s trying a new-world one.

Michael Arrington:

As an aside, and despite rumors of their possible sale, AOL is clearly putting a massive effort into transforming the company from a dial up broadband provider into a company has the competitive fire. The opening of AIM, mentioned above, is just one indication. The company has been releasing genuinely innovative new products and has also made a number of smaller strategic acquisitions over the last year or so. And there are lots more to come, apparently.

Mike Butcher:

Time Warner’s AOL has acquired leading social media network Bebo for $850 million in cash. It seems like a good move which will supercharge AOL’s advertising reach into social networking, and immediately put the heat on Microsoft, which has failed in social networking, and ailing Yahoo!, almost certain to be acquired itself very soon.

You can now make your MediaWiki running wiki have social networking features, too, as reported by Wikia head honcho Jimmy Wales:

Today at Wikia we have released our social networking features for MediaWiki under the GNU GPL 2.0. The best place to see this running live is at Halopedia, our Halo site.

I am excited about all the stuff going on in this space. With google’s open social initiative, our work in social search and social networking for mediawiki, I think the whole wiki/free culture space is about to get a whole lot more interesting.

Cool. Will have to track down where I can get this from and have a play. Might be useful for GovHack?

Edit: I can’t find it anywhere.  Help?

FriendFeed is an interesting service, which I was alerted to by Neville Hobson.

It enables you to create a ‘lifestream’ - a list of all your interactions with various social networking sites. It create a narrative list of, for example, tweets, blog posts, flickr postings, youtube videos, del.icio.us links etc etc.

As an example, here’s mine (please be my friend).

You can also choose to subscribe to other people’s feeds, which is presented on the friendfeed homepage in a Twitter stylee, or you can click to view the entire FriendFeed universe in a river of news type affair.

FriendFeed is useful, there’s no denying that. The splitting of our online personalities is well due for a reassembling, and FriendFeed makes a pretty good stab at doing that with an interesting social element to it as well. I do wonder how much services like this, and Twitter, are drawing us away from our RSS readers and back to using actual websites on a regular basis. I find myself less reliant on RSS, getting the key ‘must read’ updates through other means these days. Not that I am reporting the death of the aggregator, of course, merely that it’s slightly less dominant these days, for me at least.

I also think there might be some really useful applications of this, especially if it becomes possible to extract stuff from the public timeline along the lines of subject matter, maybe through tagging or just identifying keywords, rather than just by identity as it is done now.

Oh, and Scoble’s in now. So it’s going to be huge.

John Naughton:

…the Guardian has a policy of allowing people to post comments anonymously, which IMHO is a good way of encouraging people to behave badly, because they don’t have to take responsibility for their views. I’ve always thought that was a bad decision.

Hear, hear.

Of course, in my earlier discussion about why anonymous posting is generally speaking a Bad Thing, I forgot to mention the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory:

Sums it up perfectly for me.

…seems to be completely knackered today.

This blog has a clear theme this morning. Here’s another tool that makes Twitter even more useful: Twitter100. It displays the latest updates from up to 100 of the people you follow on one page. It certainly makes following what’s going on a lot easier.

Thanks to Mike Butcher for the link (via Twitter, of course!).

Mike Butcher reports on TechCrunch UK about Tweetmeme, a new UK based service which provides updates as to what the hot discussions are on Twitter. A Techmeme for microbloggers, if you will. Having had a look at it this morning, much of the conversation being tracked is around Tweetmeme itself, though the new WordPress Twitter clone theme Prologue is making waves too. This will be an interesting service to track, to see what conversations I might be missing out on.

As Mike says:

Tweetmeme looks for new content and tracks who else is talking about it. It ranks the content based upon who and how much a particular item is being discussed. As anyone knows, the number of URLs which spread virally through Twitter each day must run into the millions, so tracking where that viral trail starts and gains momentum is going to be fascinating. It also categorises the content into blogs / videos / images and audio. Sure there are other Twitter aggregators like Politweets (politics), TweeterBoard (conversation analytics) and many others. But Tweetmeme has a few other features including a ‘river’ of new content and RSS feeds for the river (or categorized feeds for blogs / videos / images / audio). In addition Fav.or.it will integrate Tweetmeme into its API so you’ll be able to comment on blog posts through Tweetmeme.

Twitter is becoming an indispensable tool for me - albeit one I didn’t know I needed until I started using it in a big way. I guess that as with a lot of these social networking type utilities, Metcalfe’s law applies - the more people use it, the more useful it is. Now I am following a number of people, and them tuning into my updates, suddenly I can’t get enough of pinging little messages around: about what I am doing, or what I need to know, or how I can help others.

So what is Twitter? Well, it’s a ‘micro-blogging’ service. You’re limited to 160 characters per post. That limit is important, because it means you can use text messages from your mobile phone to update your status, and also to receive them from others.

As every good Web 2.0 service should, Twitter has released an API, meaning that others can building applications which ‘mashup’ Twitter with other services to make it more useful. A good example is Dave Winer’s Twittergram, which lets you post short bursts of audio onto Twitter; or hashtags, which allows people to post on, and follow memes through Twitter.

Dan York has an excellent post on the ways he uses Twitter. I’ve quoted his headings below:

1. Twitter as News Source
2. Twitter as Knowledge Network
3. Twitter as Virtual Water Cooler
4. Twitter as a way to stay up-to-date with friends
5. Twitter as a Travelogue
6. Twitter to Track Conferences
7. Twitter as a PR/marketing Tool
8. Twitter as a Learning Tool
9. Twitter as Fun
10. Twitter as a Daily Lesson in Humility (and Brevity)

Today the service has had a little trouble though, and I blame Macworld. So many people will be sending Twitter updates from their mobile phones and laptops about the big breaking news from Steve Jobs’ keynote that the whole thing is under considerable strain. And Twitter isn’t the hardiest service at the best of times. More on this from Duncan Riley at Techcrunch. How hard would it be, I wonder, for some to just copy Twitter, but back it with sufficient infrastructure to actually work all the time?

Finally, a quick real world example of how Twitter can genuinely be helpful. Last week sometime, my good friend Steve Dale sent out a message requesting that someone suggest an example of a ’shout box’ on a website. I responded within a few moments, giving a URL of a site where I had just added shoutbox functionality. Steve was in a meeting at the time, and those who were waiting for the shoutbox example were left open mouthed at the speed of this forum of communication and collaboration.

You can follow my latest Twitter updates in the widget on the left of this blog. Alternatively, join Twitter yourself and add me to your follow list!

Ning founder Marc Andreessen has posted a response to the discussions about the fact that quite a bit of Ning’s traffic is as a result of ‘adult’ communities. Ning, remember, is the service that allows you to create your own social network. Andreessen says:

First, we have built Ning to be a broad-based service — people can use Ning to create social networks and social experiences around any topic area they want and then contribute content and engage in any activity they want, as long as what they do is not illegal and fits within a pretty general set of terms of service…

Second, due to this inherent flexibility, some people have chosen to use Ning to create social networks and upload content around adult topics, including porn. It is true, there is porn on Ning…

Third, adult topics and content are a relatively small percentage of the total activity on Ning. We have various ways of quantifying this, and all of them show this to be the case.

However, my view is that I would now be much less likely to encourage someone to use Ning within the public or third sectors because of the heavy amount of adult content. I think that one of the key factors in encouraging people to engage with social media in a professional capacity is that it needs to be safe - and part of that is being free from association from undesirable content, like porn.

Ning is a great service, and could continue to be without the one-handed content!