Bebo is Down, but Not Out
Bebo site goes down / Image via Wikipedia
UK – Yesterday at 10am, the once popular social networking site Bebo could not be accessed by visitors or users. This news, combined with a tweet from the site’s founder Michael Birch, caused users to think that Bebo had been closed permanently.
Birch’s tweet expressed that his sadness that the site had ‘gone’, and that he had enjoyed using it with friends. Nevertheless, on the same day, Birch tweeted that the site should be back in several hours.
Bebo remains inaccessible, with browsers unable to connect to the server.
The sites administrators have stated that, rather than the site being closed down permanently, it instead had suffered technical problems. Nevertheless, Bebo’s two official twitter feeds have remained silent.
Users of other social networking utilities have used this moment to discuss their experiences of the website, with users posting some very favourable and nostalgic messages. Some users are more sceptical, questioning the sincerity of nostalgic users’ accounts of a site which has been declining in popularity for years. Some news webpages are even posting obituaries to the site. Twitter users are tweeting their opinions using the hashtag #bebomemories.
At one point in the life of the website, Bebo was a real rival to Facebook and Myspace, with more than ten million users. The company AOL bought Bebo in 2008 for £549m, and since that point the site has lost profitability and popularity. It is now owned by Criterion Capital Partners, who bought it from AOL for a meagre £6.3m.
With so little solid information available, users are free to speculate about the future of the fallen social network in the next few days. Nevertheless, whether the site’s administrators use this moment to finally close it down or whether like BBC Asian Network, the threat of closure boosts usage, users should know in the next few days.
If Bebo does close down, it will make the social networking market more of a monoculture, and will increase the pressure on Google+ as the main challenger to the possible Facebook monopoly. At this stage, the site destiny looks shaky, seeing as it did not come back a ‘few hours’ after it shut down as promised.
