{"id":1457,"date":"2008-10-10T20:48:01","date_gmt":"2008-10-11T03:48:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wapreview.com\/?p=1457"},"modified":"2008-10-10T20:48:01","modified_gmt":"2008-10-11T03:48:01","slug":"bebo-mobile-by-aol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/1457\/","title":{"rendered":"Bebo Mobile by AOL"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"BeboI first heard of Bebo about a year ago at the first San Francisco Mobile Camp<\/a>. Bebo’s Jordy Mont-Reynaud gave a presentation titled “What’s The Killer App in Mobile Social Networking?<\/em>”\u00a0 I was impressed with Jordy’s talk, he really seemed to understand how to work within the constraints of mobile.\u00a0 One of his major points was that mobile services must be\u00a0 affordable to users.\u00a0 Jordy advocated using bandwidth sparingly and having both an SMS based platform for users with messaging packs and a mobile web alternative for those with (hopefully unlimited) data packages.<\/p>\n

A year ago, Bebo was looking really strong; the full web version of Bebo was the top social network in the UK and number three in the world.\u00a0 Bebo had just launched\u00a0 SMS based and mobile web versions, although at that time they were only available on-portal and only from one operator, the UK’s Orange.\u00a0 The Orange deal, which is still active, is interesting.\u00a0 For \u00a33\/month Orange Pay As You Go customers get unlimited use of the Bebo Mobile site plus unlimited SMS messages and alerts to and from Bebo. In Jordy’s presentation, he said the mobile site was scheduled to be available off-portal from any network by the end of 2007.<\/p>\n

In reality, off-portal Bebo Mobile didn’t go live until March 19th, 2008 which coincidentally was six days after AOL acquired Bebo for $850 million.<\/p>\n

In the last year, Bebo seems to have\u00a0 lost some luster and market share, giving up first place in the UK to Facebook<\/a> and dropping to sixth place worldwide<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The full web version of Bebo offers a lot of functionality in an attractive format.\u00a0 All the usual social networking features are there: friends list; public, private and semi-private profiles which are customizable with skins, music and videos; status messages; blogs; comments and groups.\u00a0 There’s messaging within Bebo as well as integration with AIM, WIM and Skype.<\/p>\n

\"BeboLike MySpace, Bebo caters to and is popular with musical groups.\u00a0 There’s a special profile for bands.\u00a0 On band profile pages users sign up as “fans” rather than “friends”.\u00a0 Band sites on Bebo include demo tracks and music videos and users can opt into receiving promotional messages and newsletters from the band.<\/p>\n

Bebo is one of the best connected of social networks, besides the IM itegration, it’s an inaugural member of both\u00a0 Google sponsored OpenSocial<\/a> and Yahoo’s OneConnect<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The mobile site has a clean, simple design that is easy and fairly intuitive to navigate.\u00a0 Unfortunately, like the mobile versions of most social networks that started out on the non-mobile web, it’s a rather limited subset of the features available in the full version.<\/p>\n

The mobile site lets you the following:<\/strong><\/p>\n