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Bebo Media Facebook

How a resurrected Bebo can challenge Facebook

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By The Drum Team, Editorial

June 23, 2010 | 4 min read

With social media website Bebo now under the ownership of private investment firm Criterion Capital Partners - having been sold by AOL, The Drum presents some top tips from the team at Switch Media over how Bebo can take on Facebook.

If the newly owned BEBO is going to take on Mark Zuckerberg's heavy-weight champion of the world , it's going to take substance, style, heart and a little cheating, here's a Rocky-style montage of top tips from Aaron Bimpson and the team at Switch Media for social networking's number one contender, seconds out....

Privacy

Mark Zuckerburg and co have been widely criticised for changing Facebook's users privacy settings last year to the most open format - unless they are manually changed by the user, with what could be diplomatically called, a considerable degree of difficulty. Whilst Facebook last week agreed to take steps to resolve this, it may be too little and too late for a frustrated audience. If BEBO can demonstrate that they have the users security in mind, "BEBOCOP" could protect and serve some of Facebook's market share.

Style

Another public criticism of Harvard's most profitable project, is the fact that each unique user is left feeling considerably less than unique. If BEBO can bring just a small design element to their user's profile page, It needn't be Myspace but even a similar design functionality to that offered by Twitter, it could well see creative types everywhere reaching for a mouse and paintbrushing their way to BEBO.

New Functionality

As users today we can communicate on-line almost any way we can think of, we can Instant message on MSN, we can chat on Facebook and we can Skype, if BEBO can harness the technology and give us all the best of both worlds, if we could "Instant-Skype" that would really get people talking.

Get ahead of the game

Facebook have been working hard to further their offer and stay in front of the competition and "fCommerce" (Facebook Commerce) is on the rise, Zukerberg and team are intending to offer businesses the facility to sell products online. The most likely beneficiaries are those selling B2C and B2B will be in the distant future. If BEBO could take on the next step and throw in some of the (more useful) features from the likes of Linkedin into the mix, tomorrow's young professionals could be today's BEBO users....BEBOBAY anybody?

Copy Cat

If you can't beat them, join them, or in this case let them join you. If BEBO could develop an API for developers to build and integrate apps and features (made so massively popular on facebook) many developers would simply port their apps over, allowing BEBO to rapidly gain some ground by way of functionality. Care must however be given to allow users of BEBO to control the automated outputs of any applications so they don’t muddy the users wall with a running commentary of their farmville events!

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