Bebo 1 Bebo Bebo, Inc. Type Private [1] Founded January 2005 Founder Michael Birch Xochi Birch Headquarters San Francisco, California, United States Area served Worldwide [2] Key people Adam Levin (CEO) Profit N/A Owner Criterion Capital Partners Employees 50 [3] Website bebo.com [4] Alexa rank 2208 (June 2011) Type of site Social network service Advertising Banner ads Registration Required Available in Multilingual, including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch Launched July 2005 Current status Active Bebo (pronounced bee-bow) is a social networking website launched in July 2005. It is currently owned and operated by Criterion Capital Partners, after taking over from AOL in June 2010. The website's name is an acronym for Blog Early, Blog Often.[5] Users receive a personal profile page where they can post blogs, photographs, music, videos and questionnaires to which other users may answer. Additionally, users may add others as friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Bebo is very similar to other social networking sites, mainly Facebook.[1] Bebo was founded by Michael Birch and his wife Xochi Birch in January 2005 at their home in San Francisco.[1] It was acquired by AOL on March 13, 2008 for $850 million.[6] [7] In April 2010, AOL announced it was planning to sell or shut down Bebo,[8] with the sale being completed on June 17, 2010 to Criterion Capital Partners for an undisclosed sum.[9] It has been reported that the sale raised less than $10 million.[10] Bebo 2 Website Each Bebo User receives a profile, which must include two specific modules, a comment section where other users can leave a message, and a list of the user's friends. Users can select from many more modules to add. By default, when an account is created the profile is private, which limits access to friends specifically added. The user may select the "Public Profile" option so as the profile will still be visible to any other members of a school they may have joined. Profiles may be personalized by a design template that is the background of the user's profile, known as a skin. Profiles may include quizzes which offer multiple choice, polls for their friends to vote in and comment on, photo albums which allows the user to upload an unlimited number of images with a maximum limit of 96 per album, blogs with a comments section, a list of bands of which the user is a fan, a list of groups that the user is a member of. A 'Video Box' may be added, either hot-linked from YouTube, uploaded directly to Bebo's servers via Motionbox [11] or copied from a Bebo Media Content Provider's page. Lifestream Users can view the recent changes friends have made to their homepage from the 'Home' menu. These changes can include uploaded photos, updated flashboxes and newly added videos and friends. A friend's updates to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and other services can also be viewed, if those friends have linked those accounts to their Bebo profile. It has a number of privacy settings, where you can control what items from your profile appear on yours and your friends lifestream page, e.g. Photos, Your 'Sayings', Applications, Comments, Bebo Lifestream (May 2011) etc. Users have complained that it is too crowded and 'ugly', but Bebo responded to this by updating the whole page and adding some new features, as well as improving the existing ones. Bebo Mobile Bebo launched their Mobile version of the site in early 2006, making users access Bebo from a mobile device. In 2007 & 2010, the mobile site has been updated to match the design and features of the full site. In 2009, Bebo released a free Application on the App Store, letting users visit Bebo on their iPhone's and iPod Touch's under AOL, Bebo's former owners. As of April 2011, the Bebo app has been removed from the App Store and is in the stage of being redesigned and updated and is scheduled for re-launch in the next few months. It is reported that they are looking into a BlackBerry application and on other Smartphones. Bebo Authors On February 22, 2007, Bebo Authors, also known as Bebo Books, was launched. On this section of the site, authors can upload chapters of their books and also get them reviewed with a certain module. Currently there is no module to display books on a profile page like there is for Bands and Groups. Bebo Groups On July 10, 2007, the "Group" module was added to pages. This enabled people to view groups which were previously joined to a school and were also viewable only to school members. Bebo also gave an option to convert existing Authors or Bands to Groups. This conversion takes up to 24 hours as the profile must be manually changed by a member of Bebo staff. Group pages give users an option to join things they find interesting. These groups can often be educational as well as associated with Big Brother UK 2008.[12] Bebo 3 Bebo 3rd Party Login Users can log in and/or make a Bebo account using their existing Facebook account (using a service called Facebook Connect), their AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) account, and a number of other 3rd Party services. AIM is included because Bebo was bought by AOL and they own AIM. Bebo Chat A new service called Bebo Chat, was launched with several other updates in 2011, which allows users to chat to other users. using a Meebo chat plugin, but with Bebo branding. Users can also update their 'Saying' and show their availability status, as well as have access to other links to Bebo's pages, and special offers. It also provides a link for users to visit Bebo's fan page on Facebook, where they can 'Like' their page and receive updates. Open Media Platform Announced on the November 13, 2007, Bebo's Open Media Platform is a platform for companies to distribute content to the Bebo community. Content providers can bring their media player to Bebo, and monetize the advertising within it. Each content provider has a specialised page designed for video which showcases any Adobe Flash video content at the top of the profile. Many networks are signed up for the service, including CBS, Sky, Ustream.tv, BBC and Last.fm. Open application platform Bebo joined OpenSocial, a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web. It announced plans for a developers platform and said it will make a further platform announcement. Bebo's Open Application Platform was launched in early December 2007 with just over fifty applications and is now host to hundreds. Many members disliked the new applications created with the profile and asked Bebo to remove them.[13] One of the main complaints was it made it easy for application developers to provide a way for members to send invites to all their friends on Bebo and many applications encouraged users to do so. A poll was held on the Bebo developers page and had a majority against apps.[14] Privacy and security Bebo offers three privacy levels: public, private and fully private. Public profiles can be seen by any user, except that profiles of users younger than sixteen years old are seen only by logged in users. Private profiles are seen only by their friends and members of any school or college they have joined. Fully private profiles are ones that have not joined any school and so only their direct friends can view their profile. If a user chooses the 'Public' option, they can also set age restrictions on who can contact them. Age restrictions do not apply to direct friends. Bebo also allows a user to set their photos to private, so only friends can see them and can stop others from copying them too. Most users disliked Bebo's privacy settings and in feedback to Bebo have been told to update it to Facebook-like settings. Inadvertent privacy breach by New Zealand ISP On May 21, 2008 some users in New Zealand were temporarily given full access to other users' accounts.[15] Various users logged in under their own account were switched over to the accounts of other users at random intervals, some people gaining access to over 20 different users' accounts. People were sometimes given access to addresses and phone numbers of other members, and some took advantage of the situation by uploading pornography onto other members' accounts.[16] Bebo network engineers traced the error to a mis-configured proxy server in an Internet service provider (ISP) in New Zealand, which was later fixed. The ISP seemed to be interfering with its cache, thereby causing some of its customers to receive cached cookies and details from other users, likely because the ISP used dynamic IP addresses. Bebo 4 New Bebo Possible Closure and Sale On April 7, 2010, AOL announced that they were either going to sell the website,[17] or shut it down. This was mainly due to the falling numbers of unique users, Bebo users were moving to the social giants Facebook and to Twitter. AOL said that Bebo couldn't compete with other Social Networking sites at its current state, and that was the reason they was going to sell it and that they couldnt commit to taking on the massive task to keep Bebo in the social network 'race'. It has been reported that AOL's finances were struggling. Criterion Capital Partners On June 16, 2010, it was reported that AOL had sold Bebo to hedge fund operators Criterion Capital Partners.[18] The purchase was confirmed[19] on June 17, 2010.