bebo - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

As Drama 2.0 pointed out recently, AOL is starting to think it may have paid too much for Bebo.

The recent sale of Virgin Radio for 'just' £53m seems to confirm that.

We have a winner for Drama 2.0's Understatement of the Year Award.

UK-based social network Bebo has been acquired by Time Warner's AOL for $850m (£418m) in cash.

Bebo, which is particularly popular in the UK with a teenage and young adult audience, has an estimated 40m members worldwide and around 80m unique users. 

Facebook is to make its developer platform available to other social networks, allowing brands to port apps to other sites that adopt the same standards.

The move forms a response to Google's OpenSocial project, which aims to create a common standard for developing and delivering social network apps.

Bebo is reportedly set to become the latest social network to open up its development platform to third parties.

According to Mashable, the new platform will be launched tomorrow and will apparently be compatible in some way with Facebook, allowing developers to port their applications to Bebo.

The data shows that the amount of UK web traffic retailers receive from social networks increased by 153% in the first nine months of this year.

Brits are the most active social networkers in Europe, according to new stats from measurement group comScore.

Almost four in five UK internet users visited the likes of Bebo, Facebook or MySpace in August, while their usage was also above average in terms of hours spent, page views and number of visits.

The purchase looks set to boost its recently launched open source strategy – Parakey is run by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, two techies best known for helping to create the Firefox web browser.

More people searched for Facebook in the UK last week than for MySpace; more evidence that the social network is rapidly closing the gap on its rival, according to stats from Hitwise.

Though MySpace still has a 41% larger share of UK visits than Facebook, the search stats point to the growing popularity of Mark Zuckerberg's site.

Alarm bells will be ringing at MySpace UK after the News Corp-owned site posted a 300,000 drop in visitors last month, according to new stats from Nielsen//NetRatings.

The month saw MySpace’s unique visitors from Britain falling from 6.8m to 6.5m in May – only the second monthly drop it has experienced since November 2005.

With Facebook in the ascendancy, has MySpace finally jumped the shark?