Hans Across The Interwebs

British Social News network Bebo was bought this week by America Online. The big question on everyone’s mind: why? What is the added value for AOL? Where is the synergy?

AIM is still the biggest Instant Messaging Service in the US, but in a time of Twitter, Facebook and MySpace – what does that even mean any more? My guess is: not much. People seem to be moving away from IM, at least for non-work situations, and instead choosing their social network of choice. It’s no coincidence AOL is opening up their IM Service: there’s not longer anything to be gained from keeping their service closed. They’ve hit the ‘open up or become irrelevant within one year’ flag pole.

It’s my belief they are planning to roll out Bebo Services throughout their AOL membership, and to be sure this wouldn’t be a bad strategy. They won’t out-facebook facebook, but the web userbase is still growing into among more mainstream, less tech savvy people: AOL has a lot of those. So who knows where this is going. For sure, they have to try to activate and engage their userbase, because the alternative to do nothing and just give up. One big caveat of course remains: let’s hope they’ve wised up to web 2 point 0 and don’t kill this thing right away. Let’s face it, that’s not too far fetched.

There is one more perspective on this: why Bebo, and how did AOL manage to buy it? Jason Calacanis’ question on popular tech podcast TWIT keeps going through my mind. I’ll paraphrase, but he basically said that Bebo has been looking to be bought for more than a year. And when there’s Google and Microsoft with unlimited funds out there: why didn’t they buy it? I don’t know the answer, but if you do then please let me know in the comments.