Bebo dying?

ryanch09

Hey all,

Just noticed lately that a lot of my Bebo friends have joined Facebook and are abandoning their Bebos. Is this happening to a lot of people and is Bebos days of glory finally over? Give your opinions!

Professey Chin

God I hope so

robbie_998

but chin couldnt have said it any better.

Bebo died years ago and now is only full of little kids.

themadchef

Cant we just turn Boards into a secret society before they find us :eek:

ryanch09

I'd say everything went downhill for them about a year ago when thay changed the layout. Everything started loading very slow even for people on fast connections. The new profile layout is horrible! Anyone agree?

maddogcollins

This thread just reminded me I actually still have a bebo profile..Note to self - Go deactivate account now!! Not a clue what is up on it at this stage. But agree with above..New layout ruined it and it just seems very childish..I know facebook is begining to get all the little gimmick things in too but not as in your face like bebo..

DOC09UNAM

Yeah bebo's dying, it's been dying for a long time... i even stopped using the main site cause it was slow and annoying, just used it for free messages to people when had no credit and had wifi... was using www.bebo.com/m/ on the pc aswell... much nicer site to use on the pc.

ryanch09

Just checked out alexa.com traffic stats for Bebo. Look how traffic on it has gone down in the past 6 months




Heres Facebooks stats for a comparision:

Quite interesting

Podginho

ryanch09 wrote: »

I'd say everything went downhill for them about a year ago when thay changed the layout. Everything started loading very slow even for people on fast connections. The new profile layout is horrible! Anyone agree?

I agree, the new layout along with growing popularity of facebook, twitter etc is what killed Bebo IMO

fergalr

ryanch09 wrote: »

Just checked out alexa.com traffic stats for Bebo. Look how traffic on it has gone down in the past 6 months




Heres Facebooks stats for a comparision:

Quite interesting

Would you not think this is a much more pertinent graph though?


Your images are the number of pageviews per user.
That graph is the traffic rank overall, on a logarithmic scale... it makes even more apparent the difference between the two.

Also, the overall % of internet users:

craiginireland

Rumour has it that AOL are selling Bebo. Maybe that'll change things about

DenMan

Maybe that will change things. I would like to send a friend a PowerPoint attachment through bebo mail. Can it be done? I don't have her email address. Can this be done? Also Microsoft Word documents.

Thanks.

3hn2givr7mx1sc

DenMan wrote: »

Maybe that will change things. I would like to send a friend a PowerPoint attachment through bebo mail. Can it be done? I don't have her email address. Can this be done? Also Microsoft Word documents.

Thanks.

Would ya not just ask her for it?

cool_jerk

Ah christ social networkin sites what a scourge they be...someone convinced me to make a facebook page a while ago and every time I've signed in for a month now nothing works, not even the homepage loads so very pointless...

DancingQueen:)

I havn't been on bebo in weeks, very boring lately as no-one is on and most people have moved to facebook. I prefer bebo because I think it's easier to use but people just keep getting younger.I hate random people adding me to boost up their friend numbers aswel but i'm sure i'll get used to facebook.

Ciaran500

fergalr wrote: »

Also, the overall % of internet users:

30% of the internet visits Facebook :eek:

BrianD

Interesting that the new Bebo app went to number 1 and now top 10 in the Itunes app store.

Tyrant^

Yes, Bebo is dying ...

markytowny94

Ya see facebook is fast and the homepage is made up of peoples updates which can be linked to their twitter accounts. This is fast! but bebo can get old and stale if you do not reply to poeple and your profile can get old and defunct. I should be able to go on holidays and leave me social networking site for 2 months and come back. It should then be as busy as ever. But not with bebo

- lfvj22

mink_man

its finished

String

Bebo went down hill trying to make it all fancy and changing the gui so to speak. Facebook is going to go the same way. and then twitter etc. It always happens until something new and simple and fresh comes along

paddy978

Do the people you report abuse to work at weekends?

Kormeera X

ryanch09 wrote: »

Hey all,

Just noticed lately that a lot of my Bebo friends have joined Facebook and are abandoning their Bebos. Is this happening to a lot of people and is Bebos days of glory finally over? Give your opinions!

it is yeah, im auctally thinking of deleting my bebo.

El Siglo

I give facebook a year and a half, maybe less with the way it's going. Bebo has been dead a long time. This might appear as being very condescending and for that I apologise, but what has happened with bebo is something akin to housing and the phenomenon of "white flight".
What happened was that Bebo capitalised on the idea of social networking in the most simple form back in 2005. This was accepted readily by the sheeple, everyone saw the novelty of presenting themselves in the public eye for the first time. What then happened was facebook + the class divide. In that your educated, middle class etc... migrated to facebook as bebo became more and more populated with lower class, usually uneducated former school friends that caught onto this 'postmodernist' idea of social networking.
This precipitated what was called in the US during the 1960s as "white flight" so to speak, with facebook now offering much the same service as bebo without the presence of lower class people on it (kind of like 'gated communities'). Bebo became 'residualised' (i.e. greater concentration of lower class people and subsequent migration of the middle class, educated group) with more "white flight".
Now that facebook has grown, it's popularity has spread and what we're witnessing now is the emergence of the lower class cohort from bebo taking to facebook with gusto. Pretty shortly you will see another "white flight", the question is not 'if' but 'when' and 'where'?
It might be possible that bebo might get a makeover, renaming etc... and that we might see the emergence of a facebook competitor, but I doubt this. Facebook's only advantage has been the idea of mass organisations (as exhibited by the RATM Christmas No. 1 campaign). Other than that, facebook is just a sexed up version of Twitter and just by reading facebook status updates, it's not foolish to think that people are treating their facebook as a form of twitter albeit slower but one is still faced with reading what someone ate for breakfast etc... as their facebook status.
Again, I don't mean to sound so condescending ("lower class", "middle class", "educated" etc...) it's just that what I see going on, I can only explain in these rather crude terms.

NyquistFreak

oooh, that's very controversial of you El Siglo! Seeing as you can only judge based on your own social group like...Well now I actually had a rant and a half typed in reply there(and it wasn't as friendly as this one either mind you so no bad thing, haha!) but the computer crashed and I lost it all, so forgive to lack of continuity here, but few things you should be aware of before making claims like that, one being I could as easily make a similar claim about noticing how Facebook was first more used by my English friends or those who had emigrated to England back in the day when it first appeared, while both of us are correct in the sense that our respective claims are true with regard our personal experience and social group, but both are inaccurate in a generalised sense. How DO you go about judging a person's social class by means of a Bebo/Facebook profile by the way? Out of interest like, I'm really judgemental myself and love putting people into little boxes like that :rolleyes:
Bebo and Facebook were actually both released to the public in 2005, Bebo was always exactly what it claimed to be, a public social network, Facebook however started life as a humble College network over in America at Harvard University, started by one of the students as a profile site to judge your classmates attractiveness of all things (The Face Book) with a sister site started by the same guy for contacting other students who were on your course (Coursematch) in 2004. The network was extended to other colleges in the Boston area later that year, then other Ivy league schools, then to all high schools and some British Universities by the Autumn, and by the end of 2005 was completely public. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/jul/25/media.newmedia)

I could see your point of view if you were one of those student's invited by their Educator to the inter-college network which had been hi-jacked by Regular Everyday NormalGuy, or the peasants, or whatever it is the kids are calling them these days, but you weren't. As the network was spread out from the colleges, student members inviting their friends, who invite their friends again and as such the whole college connection gets diluted very fast, and seeing as Irish colleges never supported these sites, as far back as Amanda's Table (from about 10 years ago now I'd say) to the Bebo/Facebook/Twitter/whatever there is today, and all the hoo-ha that went with them, so you couldn't have been one of the invited elites, the fact that you're Irish, attending an Irish University, or out working or whatever (though I remember you from another thread ranting about students so that's the little box you're going into sir, accurate or not ) puts you into the hi-jacker's category, not the hi-jacked. The same girl (she was attending one of those English Universities on the network as it happens) introduced me to both sites back in 2006,but for whatever reason Bebo had more followers here, whatever the reason for that is, I'll let ye decide for yourselves, but the point is very few people are in the habit of entering the empty room to socialise with themselves...

Bebo was always more centered around your personal profile page, making it pretty with wallpaper, video box, little songs etc, which is probably why it seems childish today, and that eventually outlived it's usefulness with having to scroll down for half an hour on X's page to leave them a comment. People have grown out of it a little, without outgrowing the need for that interaction. Facebook provides the same service in a better way, you can see more information about more people in one page, you can scroll back farther in time in the home page, allows you post links etc, exclude certain groups from seeing certain posts, pictures (basically better security and privacy options than offered by Bebo) and it does it all without the frills that slow down the connection... back to the socialising in the empty room idea, people will always follow the crowd in a case like this, it would be kind of self defeating not to, don't you agree? Don't get me wrong either, I see what you mean by the silly status updates etc, but I just don't get how you can be making social class assumptions based on that like, especially since you can only see the status updates of those you're actually friends with? maybe get some more socially acceptable friends for yourself before of tarring everyone with the same brush nah?
I'm sorry, the way you worded your post there is probably going to rattle some cages like, rattled mine anyway, I'm not sure if that was your intention or if you really honestly believe it, either way, I'd really love to know where you're getting your notions from! Genuine curiosity here like... Not that the curiosity or opinion of a blow-in to boards with only two posts to their name should matter to ya anyway sure, god the uneducated are following you everywhere these days! :P

NyquistFreak

Sure while I'm on the rant, I do actually agree with El Siglo in that there will probably be another mass migration from Facebook to pastures greener,as the likes of Google Wave and whatever else likely to spring up over the next few months start offering better solutions etc, but just the thought that people would go to the bother of setting up new accounts, searching for friends and all that just because the riff-raff got into their so called gated residence....

fergalr

NyquistFreak wrote: »

oooh, that's very controversial of you El Siglo! Seeing as you can only judge based on your own social group like...Well now I actually had a rant and a half typed in reply there(and it wasn't as friendly as this one either mind you so no bad thing, haha!)
[...]
Out of interest like, I'm really judgemental myself and love putting people into little boxes like that :rolleyes:

I'm assuming you are mainly directing your comment at his 'white flight' claim, and are asking how people can make claims about the behaviour of ethnic groups on facebook.

Whatever about the conclusions you draw, there are pretty sound ways of investigating the user behaviour, especially if you have the data facebook do.

Here is details of some of the methods they use and some of their results on ethnicity in facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?id=8394258414&ref=mf&note_id=205925658858

NyquistFreak wrote: »

Bebo and Facebook were actually both released to the public in 2005, Bebo was always exactly what it claimed to be, a public social network, Facebook however started life as a humble College network over in America at Harvard University, started by one of the students as a profile site to judge your classmates attractiveness of all things (The Face Book) with a sister site started by the same guy for contacting other students who were on your course (Coursematch) in 2004. The network was extended to other colleges in the Boston area later that year, then other Ivy league schools, then to all high schools and some British Universities by the Autumn, and by the end of 2005 was completely public. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/jul/25/media.newmedia)

I could see your point of view if you were one of those student's invited by their Educator to the inter-college network which had been hi-jacked by Regular Everyday NormalGuy, or the peasants, or whatever it is the kids are calling them these days, but you weren't. As the network was spread out from the colleges, student members inviting their friends, who invite their friends again and as such the whole college connection gets diluted very fast

Not necessarily, at all.
This is a very open area of research.
If you have a contagion, like facebook, where it only spreads when more than some number of contacts of a candidate are already members, the dilution won't happen at all as fast as it would if it just spread indiscriminately to friends of members. Check out this if you are interested:
http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/workshops/orgs-markets/archive/pdf/Macy.pdf

NyquistFreak wrote: »

[....]
I'm sorry, the way you worded your post there is probably going to rattle some cages like, rattled mine anyway, I'm not sure if that was your intention or if you really honestly believe it, either way, I'd really love to know where you're getting your notions from! Genuine curiosity here like... Not that the curiosity or opinion of a blow-in to boards with only two posts to their name should matter to ya anyway sure, god the uneducated are following you everywhere these days! :P

I dunno where that poster is getting their opinions from, but the ideas are not unique at all.
This is one of the blog postings/articles that caused the media splash over 'white flight' in facebook a while back:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/12/29/race_and_social.html

Here is the draft paper for more details:
http://www.danah.org/papers/2009/WhiteFlightDraft3.pdf


This is an ongoing area of research, and it can be a lot more complex than it might first sound!

unknown13

I personally think bebo started to go downhill when they changed the schools pages.

NyquistFreak

Hey fergalr, that was actually some really interesting stuff, cheers

I think I might have been thinking too much inside the Irish box on this one, I could see how that surname study works in the States perhaps, even though it still only gives an estimate on user's probable racial ethnicity, but over here say if the majority of regional users across all social classes have Irish surnames or French surnames in France or whatever, I'm still not sure how that post could be drawing people's class and educational standard from info like that. Bearing in mind in this country where there are foreign names it doesn't always equate with low class, think of all the foreign doctors who've ever treated you in hospital, for (a very lazy of me) example, where as Joe Irish here could have been sitting on the dole the last several years, or be the doctor in the office next door...

The user statistics for time of day use is an odd one too, fair enough dole heads are more likely to be online late at night than Mr.925, but for example, it is half past three in the morning as I'm writing this, I'm a student procratinating my dissertation (<insert sentiment of strung out panic here by the way!> :eek:) online late right now, I've been working away for the last few hours with the Facebook tab still open in the background, my ex is also online on a night shift in a nice cushy management job in EMC in Cork after getting his honours degree a while back, and Mr.Dole is on watching surf the channel somewhere, all walks of life, all Irish surnames, all on late at night... it all just seems a little too cloudy for me to see clearly still I'm afraid, but like I said I could probably admit to thinking too much inside the box on this one.

The comparison between MySpace and Facebook is another interesting one too, but I think MySpace is more seen as the musician's domain over here rather than a ghetto? I think I can see where the poster is coming from alright though, (even though I don't know anyone who left Bebo cos there were too many Eastern European people there for example like :rolleyes:...the millions of adds from those girls of dubious virtue are another thing though! ) but it would have helped if they put their remark in context the way you have! I'm also showing my own ignorance in assuming that poster was Irish I suppose...

Maybe if you were to explain it in another way: people liked Bebo until it got too popular and there were too many users on at any one time for the servers to handle efficiently and quickly and so moved to a less crowded Facebook where things ran faster, until the masses followed them over and slowed down Facebook too, and someone told the spammers where to find us, I could probably see why people might start screaming out for a Wave invite pretty soon! :P

Slow Show

Yup, it's dying very quickly. I now log on about once a week [I used to be an addict]...it really irritates me, I don't know how I liked it to be honest. The chat thing never works, it's all about people trying to boost their views and Luvs and the one thing that really annoys me is Top Friends. Why should you have to rate your friends? I'm a teenage girl and it seriously irritates me that Bebo is how you find out if someone is mad at you and it kind of hurts when someone moves you down really far or out. That probably sounds immature but it still does hurt. I've been distanced from a lot of friends lately, it just happens, and Bebo has made me feel ten times worse.
In contrast, Facebook is a lot more fun and a lot easier to interact with. I agree that in a few years or less there will probably be some new phenomenon but while it lasts I'll make the most of it [I love Facebook].
I logged into Bebo today and I see no reason to log in again. Nearly all of my friends on it are on Facebook at this stage so I'll stick to that. I'll probably check back in two weeks or so...I'd love to delete it, but I can't bring myself to just for the nostalgia that the old comments give me.
Wow, that was a long anyone. But anyway, I needed to get that out

sullshiv

Bebo is long gone, i remeber when i first started using bebo i only joined it cause one of my friends told me to. It was great for the first couple of months and i was seriously addicted the minute i came in from school i went onto it and started chatting with people i had just left 5min ago :eek:

The thing that used annoy me was the top 16 friends thing, i really didnt care but i had people leaving me comments asking me why they weren't in my top friends so i final arranged my top friends and still had people asking me. The chat thing never ever worked for me it was so stupid like.

I recently deleted my page cause i never use it any more and a good friend of mine txted me asking why i had deleted her as a friend on bebo, she is the only one left on bebo now so i mustn't be the only person she texted wondering why i had deleted her.

To be honest Bebo is very childish and i cant stand it any more, the quiz used to be fun but then people started begging people to do em and they got annoying aswel.

Facebook all the way at the moment but sumthing will come along in a few years to take over Facebook just like Bebo!

Sirpineapple

Yeah all my friends have moved off bebo , but I think it's become more of a young teenage thing , aka 12 - 15
I dunno

MickShamrock

Bebo is dead. Facebook is far superior.

lolzNato

Please god, let bebo die I get constant invites to groups like "Freebie Xbox Click Here" etc etc :pac:.Long live Facebook

Yakult

OT a bit but does anyone bar americans and bands use myspace anymore? lol
Bebo imo is just a kiddies social network now. I personally dont know anyone over 18 who uses it anymore, they all went to facebook. and tbh I see facebook becoming ****e fairly soon as it gets bigger, like bebo.

Sirpineapple

lolzNato wrote: »

Please god, let bebo die I get constant invites to groups like "Freebie Xbox Click Here" etc etc :pac:.Long live Facebook

Lolz what about facebook's will you be my neighbour in farmville requests??:P

lolzNato

haha true, get about 50 updates a day from neighbours "please send me a chicken or a fence" haha but atleast its more fun than bebo .You can really see bebo is desperate because the new layouts and the status updates trying to be more like Facebook but they shall fail

Sirpineapple

I actually thought bebo was dead like a year ago.

oh and I use myspace , but only for finding music

Dickerty

I see AOL are looking at two options for Bebo - sell it and reclaim ANY of the $850M they spent 2 years ago, or close it down.

What a horrendous waste of money. I am astonished that AOL keep making the same mistakes!

cleremy jarkson

El Siglo wrote: »

I give facebook a year and a half, maybe less with the way it's going. Bebo has been dead a long time. This might appear as being very condescending and for that I apologise, but what has happened with bebo is something akin to housing and the phenomenon of "white flight".
What happened was that Bebo capitalised on the idea of social networking in the most simple form back in 2005. This was accepted readily by the sheeple, everyone saw the novelty of presenting themselves in the public eye for the first time. What then happened was facebook + the class divide. In that your educated, middle class etc... migrated to facebook as bebo became more and more populated with lower class, usually uneducated former school friends that caught onto this 'postmodernist' idea of social networking.
This precipitated what was called in the US during the 1960s as "white flight" so to speak, with facebook now offering much the same service as bebo without the presence of lower class people on it (kind of like 'gated communities'). Bebo became 'residualised' (i.e. greater concentration of lower class people and subsequent migration of the middle class, educated group) with more "white flight".
Now that facebook has grown, it's popularity has spread and what we're witnessing now is the emergence of the lower class cohort from bebo taking to facebook with gusto. Pretty shortly you will see another "white flight", the question is not 'if' but 'when' and 'where'?
It might be possible that bebo might get a makeover, renaming etc... and that we might see the emergence of a facebook competitor, but I doubt this. Facebook's only advantage has been the idea of mass organisations (as exhibited by the RATM Christmas No. 1 campaign). Other than that, facebook is just a sexed up version of Twitter and just by reading facebook status updates, it's not foolish to think that people are treating their facebook as a form of twitter albeit slower but one is still faced with reading what someone ate for breakfast etc... as their facebook status.
Again, I don't mean to sound so condescending ("lower class", "middle class", "educated" etc...) it's just that what I see going on, I can only explain in these rather crude terms.

This is exactly my observations on the whole thing. Extremely good post, was going to try to say something like it but you took the words out of my mouth.

lolzNato

hehe all my friends on bebo are freaking out because they heard bebo is being shut down Here's hoping

wayhey

Does anyone know how to download photos en masse from Bebo? Or do you have to right-click Save Image the whole time? I'm finally getting round to getting rid of mine but I'd like to keep some pictures..

MrStuffins

wayhey wrote: »

Does anyone know how to download photos en masse from Bebo? Or do you have to right-click Save Image the whole time? I'm finally getting round to getting rid of mine but I'd like to keep some pictures..

I'd like to know this too. I copied one of my folders yesterday but it took me bloody ages!

DancingQueen:)

I went through all of my pictures and dragged them on to my desktop, took forever but i love all of the pictures and didn't want to lose them.

wayhey

Looks like its old school then

If bebo does go the way of the dodo, then I wonder.

If someone *cough, cough* were to develop an app to transmit their bebo photos to their facebook profile,

they'd be egadzillionaires.

Just throwing it out there......

To you techie types........

pphheerroonn

The website was pretty poor before hand, it had a serious identity crisis but once AOL took over it went completley down the pipes. But I'd imagine if they are going to shut it down they'd give you an easy way to download all your photos. I don't use it anymore but it will be a shame to see it go.

Hyperupdate

I never liked it

Asphyxia

I joined bebo back in 2006 the same time that I joined Facebook, From what I can remeber it was alot less flashy than it is now a simple backround theme. There was no apps or any silly stuff that made the page a mile long. I enjoyed it because I got back in contact with people who I thought I would never see again including a sister which I lost all contact details with. It was my first social networking site so the excitement of adding people and putting up pictures was crazy and I ended up pretty addicted to it.

For me it died around the end of 2008, they had too many changes made apps and silly new layouts and there was way too many bitchy people on it who always found ways to get to you whether you blocked them or not. Facebook is different you can hide your profile alot better and talk to people easier. I still have my bebo account mainly because of the pictures I have to save from it. But none the less Bebo is over.