If you have been paying attention to the activities among social networks over the past year, you would have noticed that Bebo is one of the few networks that realizes it’s a media company. While MySpace has announced a music service and imeem has expanded their dominance in social music, Bebo has been focusing on distributing original content. Today Bebo announced the launch of Model.Live. This new show is sponsored by Express and will air on Vogue.TV and Bebo.

The show will reveal “the truth about how professional models live.” I’m sure it will be thrilling! If you are running a social network and don’t think that you are in the media business, you are probably fooling yourself. Mark Zuckerberg is known for positioning Facebook as a technology company but as Kara Swisher said in her interview with Mark and Sheryl Sandberg, Kara kept trying to push Mark into admitting Facebook’s a media company.

As expected, Mark didn’t relent but it is clear that social networks have become an alternative to other media channels such as television. While you can argue that both television and social networks can be used in conjunction, I see them as an alternative because its rare to see a television show leverage a social network to complement itself. Users spend a significant amount of time consuming content on the sites and hence, they are media companies.

The job of social networks is to help people connect and ultimately to provide engaging content (which is typically created by the users). Nobody ever said that the content can’t be original, “high quality” content. Do you see social networks as media companies? What opportunities do you see for original content on social networks?