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15.04.2006 ~ SMA 2/3: Bebo

DigDong The Witch is Dead (brought to you by the word clemen) ...

Bebo.com. The "next generation social networking site where members can stay in touch with their College friends, connect with friends, share photos, discover new interests and just hang out". Yeah! Bebo is a web-site. A web-site. But its getting an awful lot of press.

So, I've signed up. Usual info required to become part of the experience (name, age, email, heart of first born and agreement to the epic 'moving post' terms & conditions). Once past the login stage, Bebo tries to put you into context - corralling users into groups based on their academic present or past. Then it allows users to swap message and pictures with members of their group. Presently the site lists schools and colleges from the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and good ole dot IE.

Now what?

Ok... now I'm part of the Bebo community and 'made friends'. They're all real-life friends, but somehow Bebo makes friendship special. Cool! And now I can now create my 'Top 16' friends and list them based on preference - real friends, cronies, groupies, acquaintances, well wishers and so on! Its good to classify, so thank god Bebo is here to help me categorise my friendships - where would I be without it?

Social Networking, Connect with friends

I wonder how people met and maintained friendships before Bebo? Or managed their inbox - mine is dripping with more 'service@bebo.com" than "satisfy your lover" e.mails - and that has been the spam king since 1995...

Share photos

Upload your photos. Divide them into galleries. Give them a title. Wait for the masses, sorry, I mean your friends, to come and peruse. But bebo doesn't have tagging or a functional search facility, so those sequenced shots of your friends vomiting in beat to bohemian rhapsody may slip past the great un-washed un-appreciated. Flickr does a better job. A much better job!

Discover new interests, hang out

... in front of your (or the college's) computer. Because hanging out in front of your computer is fun, the next generation of fun - trust me - all the fun people are doing it. Had Bebo's approach really been as next generation as it claims you could 'hang-out' in real life and still be connected to Bebo using a mobile phone. But no...

Next Generation?

A collection of blogging, photo gallery and commenting tools. Next Generation? I need someone to explain this to me. Use small words and use them sparingly. How does bebo define itself as next generation? It's technology? No - on that front its several generations old. Non-validating Html 3.2 (177 errors on the homepage alone!), no RSS, ATOM, RDF or any form of syndication. Sure, it claims to be an Oracle rDBms, but who doesn't these days!

So maybe its their unique approach - the whole online social networking thing. Nope - Myspace and google's orkut have been mapping those degrees of seperation for years, in most cases a hell of a lot better.The revenue model? Nope - another case of venture capital to the left of me, adwords to right! Their target market...? Everyone wants a buck off students these daze...!

...next generation? Heh!

So what are we left with?

A website that allows users to natter, generating (and stealing) content that not only will be forever locked into Bebo's servers (bar old fashioned 'copy n paste' there are no export  or syndication features at time of writing), but have allowed Bebo to do whatever it wishes with the material you post. Think about that. You post your photos for your friends to see and now Bebo has the right to republish those photos anywhere - it can even add a handlebar mustache and pirate's patch because you clicked that shiny 'I Agree' button. 

But so did I. And while I won't be posting anything of value, others will...

Despite all the flaws (plus future legal ramifications) and the fact the website is little more than a rosy "Comic Sans" Geocities for the present generation, I begrudgingly have to admit that Bebo almost works. I've bumped into people I'd lost touch with a long time ago. But as far as maintaining that contact goes there are much better tools out there (Skype, regular e.mail, sms and natural conversation to name just a few)

What am I missing?

Loads! I haven't touched on the bugs. Session / cookie based navigation and the back button JUST DON'T WORK! More than once I've popped comments into a user's profiles I didn't intend to - that could get me into loads of trouble!!! I've briefly mentioned the incessant spamming (did I say spamming, I meant e.mailing) of 'alerts' to messages, comments etc. Others are making a fuss ranging from bullying through to pedophiles all the way to 'inappropriate usage of college resources' - not realising they're all the same thing.

But in the final analysis - this is what I hate most about Bebo?

...happy zombie Jesus weekend!

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