Posts Tagged ‘Bebo’

“This is not only to protect minors from unwanted contacts but also to protect their online reputation. Youngsters do not fully understand the consequences of disclosing too much of their personal lives online. Education and parental guidance are necessary, but we need to back these up with protection until youngsters can make decisions based on full awareness of the consequences.”

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

“Jolitics is a Political Networking site designed to encourage open constructive political debate. Jolitics aims to avoid the intimidating, and dare we say slightly boring aspects of politics. Everyone can create and vote on political proposals and campaign their government to make changes.” [Monkey Inferno, 2010]

Social network Bebo has just launched a new video chat service called bChat, powered by vChatter, to enhance user experience by matching up its 117 million global members for random chat.

If you’ve scanned the social networking news recently, you’ve probably noticed that many non-Facebook social networks are losing traffic, and a lot of them are shifting direction towards games. hi5 acquired Big Six games last week and Bebo launched a dedicated games section late last year. MySpace has been losing traffic steadily for years, and [...]

Bebo Games has officially launched this week, with the company reporting successful numbers for developer and user interest. Bebo Games are offered through several partnerships with game developers, and the top-down approach taken by AOL-owned Bebo means a more uniform game experience for end users.

What Bebo has done with its game platform is integrate it with several of its existing features, such as chat, messages and other forms of notifications. This means that users can do things like challenge other users to a game directly from their chat window. It also means that developers have more immediate access to users for the purpose of encouraging them to return to their games.
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Bebo has taken a cue from Facebook and has created a competition around the applications on its platform. Today the social network announced the winner of its “Engage to Succeed Today” contest, which sought out the five most engaging new applications on Bebo. These winners will receive promotional status on Bebo. The grand prize winner, however, receives a prize from the contest’s co-sponsor, the Sun Startup Essentials program.

That grand prize winner was Bowling Buddies, an app built by Playfish Games. Nick O’Neill claims that he has been addicted to this game for the past week on Facebook. The other top four apps to gain recognition were Solid Sudoku, Robokill Trainer with J2Play, Banangrams and Kick Mania. The response Bebo received for this contest aimed at its developer community was pretty good, with over 2,000 applicants.
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After shutting down its own video upload service and recommending Motionbox as an alternative, AOL has managed to find a way to actually partner with the company it suggested for video uploading and sharing. Motionbox has a new partnership with AOL’s recently acquired social network Bebo, to provide video storage, publishing and sharing services to its users.

If you’re a Bebo user, you may have noticed the transition messages via email and on Bebo’s website for the past month or so. Those that choose to use the new Motionbox-powered video services will be able to access basic membership features, enabling them to use online editing tools, secure storage and sharing options.
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Yes, Bebo has joined the ranks of the larger social networks out to take your soul. Yesterday’s announcement from Bebo revealed its new Social Inbox, which not only lets you log in using their AOL and AIM credentials, but will aggregate social feeds, mail and media recommendations from a host of services including witter, Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL (of course).
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AOL’s social networking site Bebo has a message to tell to the two top social networks MySpace and Facebook – they are ready also a top social networking site and they are ready to battle it out with the two top social networks. And with that, Bebo has launched their latest offering to the maddening social networking crowd – Social Inbox. Read more

Last night Bebo announced a new program for developers which rewards them with more exposure. The announcement came on the same day that Facebook announced the voting round for the fbFund which will reward applications with $250,000 each for the five finalists. If you prefer the LiveScribe Pulse Smartpen over $250,000 from Facebook, then I highly recommend checking out the Bebo competition.

I don’t mean to give Bebo such a hard time but announcing the competition on the same day that Facebook announces a new round fbFund doesn’t seem like such a great idea. Bebo isn’t slacking on their platform development though. Yesterday the company demoed new metrics and engagement tools. I’ve reached out to Bebo for comment on what the new metrics are but have yet to hear back.

It’s clear that Bebo is taking their platform seriously, and while application traction may not be as high as competing platforms like Facebook and MySpace, top applications have attracted hundreds of thousands of users. The top application on the site, Stickerz, currently receives over 50,000 active daily users. While it’s not anywhere near the more than 1 million active daily users that top Facebook applications attract, there is still a solid enough user base to generate consistent advertising revenue.

So for those active Bebo developers, the new metrics tools (whatever they may be), will most definitely be welcomed. If we receive any updates from Bebo I’ll be sure to post screenshots of the new tools and details about them.

Update
I just spoke with Jessica Alter from Bebo who gave me an update on the Bebo developer update. There are a few things to mention. First, the competition prizes will include “valuable items from Sun Microsystems” which we can only imagine to be servers or something of that nature. In regards to the metrics available to developers, they can now have access to time spent and percentage of returning users from the developer application.

The purpose of the new metrics is to reward developers that are building engaging applications. Those that succeed at building engaging applications will be rewarded with the ability to send newsfeed items to non-app users. There will be more incentives announced in the future. So far 60 applications have been submitted to the contest and January 6 will be the last day for submissions. The main purpose of this contest is to underscore Bebo’s commitment to engagement.

Hopefully that clears some things up!