Maybe It's Late, But Call Me

Bebo was created in a living room by spouses Xochi and Michael Birch. It was their fourth attempt to start a dot-com business. Michael, from Great Britain, and Xochi, from California, closely watched Friendster grow in popularity and wanted to try again with an SNS targeting the thirty-something crowd. Unfortunately, that group was not, like children and teens, web connected. After some re-tooling, they launched again the site took off with web savvy school-age children. In 2006 the site had 25 million users globally and now has 40 million.

First published in 2005, Bebo was owned by the Birches unto 2008 when it was sold to AOL for $850 million, with $600 million of that going to the Birches. The site still exists today and the Birches reside comfortably in California.

This SNS site was set apart from the others in 2007 with an online drama called KateModern. That caught an audience large enough to catch the attention of several major media outlets who wanted to either partner or purchase the site. The Birches did not sell but instead a Google executive was hired away to become Bebo president who soon launched the site in Polish, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch. Its popularity exploded. Claiming itself to be the top SNS in Britain, New Zealand and Ireland; MySpace and Facebook still beat it out in the U.S.

I’m currently very low on personal use of an SNS due to my mediocre (actually poor) experience with Facebook. Early in 2008 I was invited to be a Facebook friend by an acquaintance who wanted to share photos from a family vacation. That was nice. Almost immediately, I was invited to be a “friend” by my niece in college. I was flattered, thinking she must think a lot of her ol’ Auntie to want me to be her friend. As soon as I accepted her invitation, I was invited to be friends with nearly all our teenage nieces and nephews. I was ecstatic that they all invited me– then I started to read their posts and quickly realized that the constant chatter was not interesting to me and often downright annoying. Sometimes it’s just better not to know what the people you love are doing on an hour-by-hour basis, especially if it involves tattoos on butts. Then I started to receive friend invitations from people I had never seen or heard of before. Who were these people? Even though you can always choose to ignore the invitation, they had seen my name and profile information - and that really creeps me out. I still have the account, but have gone back to my profile and made heavy edits.

Richardson and Hargadon make very strong cases in our reading this week for educational use of an SNS. But they sound very complex to set up, and very difficult to learn. I’m going to have to go slowly on this one to feel comfortable, competent and know students are fully protected.

Information compiled from www.guardian.co.uk, mashable.com, and techcrunch.com.