The Inquisitr » bebo

SocialMedia Networks Snags $6 Million

JR — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:28:39 +0000

Social media advertising firm SocialMedia Networks has secured $6 million in fresh funding this Friday. The Series B dough comes from IDG Ventures SF and Charles River Ventures.

SocialMedia Networks serves ads in about 5,000 different applications on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and Hi5. It claims to be the Internet’s largest independent social media advertising network.

The new funding will go toward expanding the company’s Chicago, New York, and international sales teams.

SocialMedia Networks has been around since 2007.

SocialMedia Networks

I want to be acquired by AOL [Socialthing]

Duncan Riley — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:06:35 +0000

AOL’s acquisition of lifestreaming service Socialthing has been confirmed, reports Mashable. Financials have not been revealed.

According to their QBase entry, “Simplifying the management of sites and services that you already use like blogs and social networks, socialthing! synchronizes your personal information, content, and friendships so that you can post this information across the social web, as opposed to just having it contained in a single site.”

Socialthing can be added to a long list of AOL Acquisitions, including Truveo, Sphere, Bebo and Weblogs Inc. in the social space.

AOL may not be the most popular or most highly trafficked company on the web, but they’re like the little engine that could, they keep on trying, and they aren’t afraid to spend money to buy in destinations and tools to help them achieve their goals. Their success rate with acquisitions may not be perfect, and we’ve covered issues at Weblogs Inc previously, but they always seem to try their best with acquisitions, as opposed to Google who has a track record of letting acquisitions die off while completely ignoring existing user bases.

The question then becomes, who would you rather be acquired by? On their track record with acquisitions, and a company that is trying its hardest to deliver the best from acquired products, the answer for me at least would be AOL and I’m betting that I’m not alone in thinking that way either.

socialthing

Arzoola: A New Voice In Social Network Communication

JR — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 22:47:01 +0000

A startup just launched over the weekend is giving an added voice to the world of social networking.

Arzoola’s Social Call lets you make and receive free VOIP-powered calls through social network-specific apps. What sets it apart from other services is the fact that it lets you do so anonymously: Users give out their phone numbers only to Arzoola, which then masks them from public view.

“We simply act as an intermediary, shielding the phone numbers from each party,” CEO Roie Edery explained to The Inquisitr. “Instead of posting your phone number online, you substitute it with our ‘Call Me’ link.”

The first application, launched Saturday, is designed with Craigslist in mind. You just go to Arzoola’s web site, enter your phone number, zip code, and an expiration time (i.e. only accept calls for two days) — then it gives you code to post within your listing. The code lets anyone click to call you without ever gaining access to your phone number. While the tool is being marketed specifically for use on Craigslist, it could be used anywhere you can post HTML embed code — on a MySpace profile, for example, or on a blog where you wanted to receive calls for a limited period of time without divulging your digits.

Next up is an app for Facebook, which Edery tells us will be launching “very soon” — likely within the next week or two, pending the network’s approval. It will add a “Call Me” button directly below your profile picture and will let you specify what days and times to let calls be patched through.

All the applications use a business-grade VOIP carrier. As of now, the calls are totally ad-free. Edery says that could change in the future — but end users will always be able to use the service free-of-charge.

“Our focus is to provide this service for free,” he said. “Once adoption picks up, it is our intent to enable our audio advertising platform. Basically, while a user is on hold waiting for us to call the other party, they will hear an ad.”

Arzoola’s Social Call will also eventually offer premium services such as voicemail and number-free text messaging, Edery tells us.

Our vote: A smart service with strong potential. The Facebook/MySpace/Bebo apps could draw people in and provide a powerful and convenient social function without the typical privacy concerns. The HTML-driven function, though, is what strikes us as most intriguing about Social Call. It’d be a huge plus to be able to receive calls on a public posting for a limited window, without having to throw your actual number on the page for the world to see. The blogosphere could stand to benefit from its embeddable functionability — think of the easy-to-click “news tip hotlines” or “talk with me now” features that could be set up to let visitors dial a blogger’s cell phone during certain hours, without him having to publicly post the number.

MySpace Slipping In UK Traffic

JR — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:38:39 +0000

Facebook is reaching new heights in the UK — and that means MySpace is slipping.

New analysis out from Hitwise today shows Facebook taking 45 percent of all social network traffic in the UK in June. Both Bebo — now in second place, with 25 percent — and MySpace — in third, with just under 15 percent — have lost significant numbers over the past several months.

Perhaps more intriguing, though, is the deeper analysis ranking all sites considered Web 2.0 — not just social networks. Facebook is still a strong first in the UK there, but YouTube is the next most visited service. Bebo came in third, Wikipedia was fourth, and MySpace was down to fifth for the month of June.

On the whole, HitWise says one out of every five URLs accessed in the UK belonged to one of those five services.

AOL Grabs Former Google Exec

JR — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:44:25 +0000

AOL has hired a former Google executive to help head up its Bebo social media network.

Kate Burns — previously managing director of Google — has signed on as vice president and managing director of Bebo Europe. She’ll be in charge of expanding business operations in the UK and across Europe.

Burns was Google’s first non-US-based employee. She left the company in 2006, citing reasons of needing a break and wanting to spend more time with her family. Since then, she has worked at Adlink and buy.at and was just recently named managing director of UK-based video site Dailymotion — a position she held for only four months.

AOL bought Bebo for $850 million back in March of this year.

Bebo

Qbox: Great Idea, But Doesn’t Work

JR — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:05:36 +0000

Qbox is a new tool that lets you aggregate and play music from a variety of social networking sites like MySpace, Bebo, and YouTube. I was pretty pumped when I read a write-up about the idea over at Mashable, but then I quickly grew disappointed when I decided to try the thing out for myself.

First of all, Qbox requires you to download and install a program — strange, considering the concept is totally web-driven. Once you install the utility, though, things get even murkier. It took me some random clicking around to figure out that I was supposed to hit a random, unlabeled icon that basically just opened the Qbox web site in my browser. Again, no instructions, but I deduced that I was presumably now supposed to click through the site to find an option to create an account before it’d let me use the service.

At this point, I was getting a little annoyed, but I was still intrigued enough to keep going. The next problem, though, popped up after I created my account, when I tried to search for songs (also done through the web site — not through the program it made me install). I found plenty of results, but when I tried to click on the play button for any of them, the web site gave me a pop-up window saying the Qplayer utility — the same utility from which I had clicked over to the site in the first place — hadn’t yet been installed.

I still wasn’t quite ready to give up, so after a few unsuccessful attempts at getting around this, I decided to humor it and click “OK” — hoping a redownload would finally convince this service I had the program and was ready to proceed. But alas, still no success. I was unable to ever get it to even recognize that I had downloaded and installed the damned thing.

Oh yeah, and clicking on the “User Guide” just played a long and tedious video with no useful information. The “Help” section consisted of a FAQ that didn’t address anything related to my issues.

I did a little digging and discovered I wasn’t the first one to have problems with Qbox. Blogger Matt Rosoff of Webware wrote about troubles of his own when he tried it out several days ago.

Don’t get me wrong — the Qbox concept is great. It’d be a treat to be able to track down and play music from various social network services in one central place, without having to deal with all the annoying internal menus and search processes of each individual site. Unfortunately, though, it appears that Qbox has a ways to go before it becomes a practical, functioning solution. Let’s hope for its sake that someone else doesn’t take the same idea and do it well in the meantime, or Qbox may never amount to more than a short-lived blip on the Web 2.0 radar.

Social Networking Cold War: FB To Open Source Platform

Duncan Riley — Tue, 27 May 2008 06:03:06 +0000

Too little, too late? TechCrunch reports that Facebook is about to open source its platform as developers flee the service for the open source Google led Open Social initiative.

Bebo already licenses access to the Facebook Platform so how it can be done is already visible. Under the new scheme ANY social network will be able to provide support for Facebook apps on their own site at no charge.

I opened the post with a question but I’m going to answer it by suggesting that while there is zero doubt that this move by Facebook is a direct response to Google (and reactionary moves are never brilliant) the depth of applications on the Facebook platform will likely see a slew of mid to low range social networks rolling out support for this.

The down side: we are now seeing a social networking cold war where various parties are lining up behind Google and Facebook, with some trying to remain neutral. Will the stand off benefit users? Unlikely, but the future of the biggest game in town is at stake, so expect both sides to further up the ante as the stand off continues.

AOL Finalizes Bebo Acquisition

Duncan Riley — Mon, 19 May 2008 08:58:46 +0000

AOL has finalized its acquisition of Bebo. The social networking number three will form the centerpiece of AOL’s newly created People Networks business unit.

Announced today, Bebo’s CEO Joanna Shields will serve as Executive Vice President of AOL and President of People Networks, which combines Bebo, AIM, ICQ and AOL’s other community platforms. Shields will report to AOL President and COO Ron Gran.

People Networks will integrate AOL’s IM, chat and mail functionality into Bebo, as well as letting users merge AIM and Bebo profiles so they can use common screen names without re-registering.

People Networks will also integrate other AOL acquisitions, including widget technology company Goowy Media and social search question and answer service Yedda. AOL plans also include the cross-distribution of AOL and Bebo content and applications across both services.