AOL upgrades Bebo with Lifestream and more
AOL continues to upgrade the Bebo social network it bought in 2008, layering in more functionality from the social data aggregator SocialThing it also acquired that year.
In December, we covered Bebo's new Social Inbox, which gathers social updates from your friends on other services and shows them on your Bebo home page. There's also a new feature, Lifestream, which will collect data from the Bebo user's external sites and put them all into one data stream that any Bebo friend can see. This feature is reminiscent of the social network aggregation function in FriendFeed.
AOL on Monday is announcing several more enhancements to the Bebo service, although not all of them will be available to users immediately.
The Lifestory feature puts all your Bebo activities into a flashy timeline.
(Credit: AOL)Lifestory is glitziest of the new features. It gathers your Bebo photos and events, and puts them into a album player that sorts them into chronological groups. Basically, it makes a fancy widget out of your life.
Bebo is getting somewhat granular privacy controls, with a feature called the Social Slider. It allows you to tag every element on the social network as appropriate for friends, family, or your "inner circle." This is a welcome, if not unique feature, although calling a control with three levels a "slider" is a bit misleading. The feature can also be used to filter incoming messages to just people close to you.
The Lifestream function collects social activity data from people around the Web, even if they are not Bebo users.
(Credit: AOL)Bebo's native instant messenger and AOL's AIM are getting integrated, so Bebo users will be able to communicate with AIM users. AIM users will also soon get Bebo profiles, which area bit richer. The company is also promising a new instant messenger experience. A release sent to journalists says, "In Q2 we will take this one step further, providing AIM users with a radically new experience for real-time communication with everyone and everything they care about." Perhaps the company is eyeing to compete with Meebo -- or maybe there's an acquisition we'll hear about (but to be clear, that's just speculation on my part).
The service is also getting a feature called Stories. It sounds like it will be a form of group blogging, oriented around events. But AOL is not saying much more about it, aside from promising a March release for the feature.
AOL execs clearly want to differentiate the Bebo network from other social nets, especially Facebook and MySpace. However, the protests sound strained. Bebo is a social network. It has different features, but it competes with the big networks (Bebo claims 22 million users versus Facebook's reported 175 million). AOL does own several interesting social data companies, though. In addition to Bebo and Socialthing, the company also owns the Q&A service Yedda, and it acquired the widget company Goowy Media. It has all the pieces and parts to make innovative and interesting social applications. All it really needs is users.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
They remind me of that horrible Facebook interface for... well, everything.
I deleted my Facebook just because the thing was that bad, the older profiles were worse, but i just got bored with the site.
Plus, the new profiles:
1) Buckle pretty much every theme created, and they will also need to rewrite their profile making instructions.
2) somehow look squashed and separated at the same time!
3) Waste some valuable space on the left column under your profile bit.
The new 1st column under the profile could easily be used for things, such as side Ads, or they could allow modules to go in there.
Last time i checked, gadgets were meant to be flexible in design.
True, flash-based modules wouldn't work in there, but basic HTML things should be able to fit easily.
Also, they need to allow modifications on the number of comments showing, that comments module is terrible.
Either that or they should make it a fixed size and throw the comments inside a scrollable Div.
But i do like some of the other features they added.
LifeStory is an interesting little (read:large) gadget.
A: Sell it to AOL.
Way to stay the course AOL.
- by confizaledsmile August 26, 2009 2:16 PM PDT
- i just want to delete lifestreem but i dont know how?!! HELP!!!!!
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