The Social

(Credit: Compete.com)

The blogosphere simply loves to slurp up social-networking traffic stats, and on Monday we got a nice tasty serving of them with some new numbers from Compete.com for the month of January. The results? Facebook is in the lead, with about 68 million unique visitors, well ahead of MySpace's 58 million. (The two are pegged at 1.1 billion and 810 million page views, respectively.)

This may be the first survey we've seen that puts Facebook ahead of the News Corp.-owned MySpace in U.S. traffic. It also puts Twitter as the third-biggest social-media site in the country by total page views, with only about six million unique visitors but a whopping 54 million views.

Compete's numbers are interesting, because they often are pretty different from other analytics firms'. Here are some clarifications, explained to CNET News in an e-mail sent by Compete's Andy Kazeniac: These are numbers stemming entirely from Web browser data in the U.S. That means that you won't be pulling in any international numbers, where most of Facebook's users are now, or data from widgets or third-party applications, which are how many avid Twitter users access the service. That means that it's likely that Twitter's reach is bigger than the numbers indicate.

What's also intriguing is that there are a few social-media sites, like Flixster and LiveJournal, with relatively low unique visitor counts but proportionally very high page view counts, indicating that they probably have smallish bases of very loyal users.

Also pulling in notable numbers are LinkedIn, with about 11 million unique users, Classmates.com, with about 17 million, and Reunion.com, with slightly under 14 million. On the other end? AOL's Bebo, an $850 million purchase, which Compete.com clocks in as having just shy of three million unique visitors. True, its biggest user bases are in the U.K. and Ireland, but that's not good considering the price tag.

Still, statistics are like tequila shots. Always take 'em with a few grains of salt and a slice of lime, and be warned that they may give you headaches.

Social network Bebo announced on Tuesday that it has made short-form video content from sports entertainment conglomerate ESPN available to its U.S. visitors. The programming available will include recap show SportsCenter Right Now, as well as clips from Mike and Mike in the Morning, Pardon the Interruption, Around the Horn, and select news and game footage.

It's a partnership that was first announced nearly a year ago but which has only now taken effect. The ESPN content will be incorporated into "Open Media," Bebo's project to provide more audio and video content to members of its "social-media network" (emphasis on the "media"). Open Media was launched last November with partners including ESPN, as well as Viacom's MTV, the BBC, and CNET Networks parent CBS.

There are plenty of old-media companies involved in this deal. ESPN is owned 80 percent by the Disney's ABC and 20 percent by Hearst. Bebo has been owned by AOL since early this year, after an $850 million acquisition by the Time Warner subsidiary.

But despite its domestic ownership, the youth-oriented Bebo is still most popular in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Adding ESPN content is another move toward capturing a bigger audience in the United States, where MySpace remains the top social network.

The knife-wielding cast of 'KateModern.'

(Credit: Bebo)

Bebo doesn't just want to be that social network that AOL bought--it also wants to be a hub for entertainment.

The site, now part of the Time Warner unit's "People Networks" division, has appointed the London-based Kelly Brett as its head of original productions.

Brett had last worked on KateModern, a Bebo-hosted video series created by Lonelygirl15 production company Eqal (then known as LG15 Productions), and she also counts projects for television networks like the BBC, Sky, and ITV on her resume.

The youth-oriented Bebo, with most of its popularity concentrated in the United Kingdom and Ireland, has hosted several original series, in addition to KateModern: Gap Year, Sofia's Diary, and The Secret Life of Sam King. Sofia's Diary was later picked up by the U.K.'s Channel Five network, making it the first British TV show to arise on the Web. In the United States, the buzzed-about Web series Quarterlife was picked up by NBC but canceled after a single episode due to low ratings.

Brett's first project is the currently airing Sam King, a collaboration between Bebo and Universal Music about a fictional Universal mail room employee whose dealings with real-life bands and artists are detailed in the comedy series.

The "social network as entertainment venue" model has been explored in varying degrees by different companies; in the U.S., the best-known example of the phenomenon is News Corp.'s MySpace, which hosts the occasional original show on its MySpaceTV platform. It also served as the platform for the final episode of the syndicated Lonelygirl15.

Fighting the common wisdom that it's tough to make money off a social-network application, AOL announced Monday that it will guarantee CPM revenues to developers on Facebook and Bebo's platforms if they opt to use its Platform-A ad technology. If a developer pulls in three unique ad impressions, AOL will pay an undisclosed flat fee.

"Advertiser interest in social networks is rising at a steady rate, and Platform-A is making an unprecedented flat-fee commitment to help application developers generate revenue and guarantee monetization of their applications," Dave Jacobs, Platform-A's senior vice president of publisher services, said in a release. "Platform-A views social-networking applications as an area where we can add significant value by letting developers focus on expanding their install base, without worrying about monetization of applications."

For AOL, it's a way to get a leg up on the dozens of small- and medium-size ad networks, not to mention Google's AdSense, that are catering to social-network platform developers, specifically those building on Facebook. The new guarantee is part of Widgnet, a developer-focused niche of AOL's Advertising.com, where the company says that "widgets are transformed from clever little applications into hard-working revenue generators."

There are so many options for application ads, and so few genuine success stories, that offering guaranteed CPMs to developers may be an effective incentive, at least at first. But the developer community is notoriously tight-knit, and if Platform-A offer doesn't reliably lead to more money from applications, word would spread quickly and developers could jump ship.

Currently, the deal extends only to U.S. visitors to U.S.-based applications on Facebook and Bebo, which AOL purchased this spring and which has an application portability deal with Facebook. The program will ideally be expanded to Europe later this summer, and potentially to other developer platforms in the future.

At the many advertising conferences dotting Internet Week New York this week, speakers and panelists have been exhorting the ad industry to start thinking more creatively when it comes to tackling digital media--even creating elaborate branded series in lieu of traditional commercials.

They weren't the only ones who got that memo. Record label Universal Music Group's Universal Music U.K. announced Monday that it's partnered with social network Bebo to broadcast a series called The Secret World of Sam King: one part video blog, one part Choose Your Own Adventure, and one part Universal advertorial. It's being produced by Globe Productions, a division of Universal.

The premise of the new series is that Sam King, an extremely low-level fictional employee of Universal Music, decides to found his own record label in the company mail room. Along the way, he encounters real-life Universal artists, and viewers will be able to submit opinions, send in material, and suggest which bands Sam should scout.

The show will also be fueled by product placement, with handset manufacturer Sony Ericsson signing on as the inaugural brand sponsor. Apparently this will lead to the protagonist "winding his boss up with mobile phone-related pranks."

Bebo and Universal have not provided a concrete debut date.

Universal's concept of a "brand show" is a bit similar to Back On Topps, a series created by former Disney exec Michael Eisner's video start-up Vuguru, as a promotion for the trading card company (which Eisner himself owns). That series, premiering this week, also pits fictional company employees against the celebrities affiliated with it--in Topps' case, famous athletes.

For Bebo, which has its biggest audience in the U.K., and parent company AOL, its 42 million members get video content that will (ideally) be enjoyable and will keep them around. It'll also be cross-promoted across other AOL video brands. For Universal, creating an (ideally) hip show geared toward Bebo's young users could help recapture the attention of a generation that's turned away from the major labels and in the direction of BitTorrent.

AOL will officially support OpenSocial, the developer standard created by Google for social-networking applications. The announcement was hinted at by Google Director of Engineering David Glazer in a speech at the Google I/O conference Wednesday.

The online service-turned-media brand will join pretty much every big player in online media that isn't Facebook: MySpace and Yahoo, for example, were major partners when Google spun OpenSocial off into its own nonprofit organization.

It's not a surprise: Bebo, the social network acquired by AOL earlier this year, already supports OpenSocial, and is being tightly integrated into other AOL communication properties like AIM and ICQ.

More details are forthcoming. AOL is not issuing a formal press release, representatives told CNET News.com Wednesday. The announcement will be in the form of a post on the OpenSocial blog later in the day.

Bebo's core demographic might be teens and young adults in the U.K., but President Joanna Shields said that now that the social network's acquisition by AOL is complete, it's time to start expanding. Now that she's in charge of AOL's "People Networks" division, which encompasses Bebo as well as the AIM and ICQ instant-messaging services, her goal is to expand the service's reach and bring it up to par with bigger rivals like Facebook and News Corp.'s MySpace.

"If you look at Bebo (a year ago) it was much more of a youth brand," Shields said in an interview with CNET News.com Monday. "It looked younger, it had a younger feel to it, but over the course of my time here, over 18 months, we've evolved the DNA of the site, we've matured it." While the Bebo of the U.K. and Ireland will retain a youth vibe, the feel will be much more universal when it "expands into new markets," per Shields.

Additionally, as Bebo creeps into new geographic territories, advertisements will be served by AOL's Platform A technology, not by current ad partner Yahoo. Bebo's U.S. site will also transition from Yahoo to AOL ads.

"In each new market we go into, of course now that we have this extraordinary technology, we will launch with Platform A," Shields said.

Yahoo will continue to serve Bebo ads in three regions. "We have a very positive relationship with Yahoo in the U.K., Ireland, and Australia," Shields explained. "That current relationship goes until the end of 2009." She declined to specify what the plan would be after that, but she did say that she expects Bebo to be exempt from the difficulties some other social sites have on the monetization front because of its focus on media consumption rather than just communication.

"Sending an ad to someone who's communicating is quite different from someone that is consuming entertainment," she said, mentioning Bebo's original video programming as well as its "Open Media" platform, which partners with companies like MTV Networks, the BBC, and ESPN. "There's no surprise that we ended up with a media company, or a company with a media heritage, given the part of the spectrum of social networking where we reside, the category we tried to create--a social media network."

Shields said it's too early in the AOL ownership to be able to gauge whether Bebo would be launching a data portability project like Facebook's Facebook Connect or MySpace's Data Availability. "I'm a firm believer that you've got to be open," she hinted. With regard to further developer-related announcements, she explained, "We've been through this quiet period through the acquisitions...We haven't yet socialized those discussions with the AOL folks because we've been operating independently."

Bebo's application platform is notable because it's compatible with both the OpenSocial standard and Facebook's application code.

But right now the mantra is expansion first. "My goal and the goal of our team is to expand distribution," she explained, "and to build and to expose the Bebo experience to more and more territories."

So many big names, so little excitement.

(Credit: Andrew Mager)

SAN FRANCISCO--Inside Facebook blogger Justin Smith had quite an opportunity on his hands. He was moderating a panel called "Comparing Social Platforms," featuring five representatives of some of the biggest players on the social Web: Dave Morin of Facebook, Allen Hurff of MySpace, Jessica Alter of Bebo, Patrick Chanezon of Google, and David Recordon of Six Apart. Smith had the chance to be a digital devil's advocate and get a lively debate going.

Why won't Facebook sign on to the OpenSocial standard that Google kick-started? Why hasn't MySpace's developer platform caught on as fast as execs had hoped? And how's it going with Bebo's have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too strategy of accepting both OpenSocial- and Facebook- compatible developer applications? On that note, how has Bebo's acquisition by AOL changed things? There were so many questions that could've been explored.

Unfortunately, the panel was sort of a yawn. Maybe that's because it was 8:30 a.m., and a number of the panelists had likely been out till the break of dawn at the wild party Digg threw the previous night. (A Web 2.0 maxim: When all else fails, blame fratty Digg founder Kevin Rose.) And the overall gist of the panel--"developer platforms are so new, so who knows where they'll go?"--didn't exactly provide a whole lot of answers to the curious audience.

"The social graph hasn't even been tapped yet," Morin, senior platform manager at Facebook, said. "We're literally, like, right in the beginning." That was pretty much the gist of the whole panel. Smith, too, brought up the novelty of it all: "A year ago, none of the platforms or products that we're talking about were even publicly available."

Chanezon, an OpenSocial API evangelist at Google, didn't exactly toss any punches at Facebook's Morin for not jumping on the OpenSocial bandwagon. In fact, he gave the social network a bit of praise for pioneering the idea of a developer platform. Once Facebook opened its doors to outside developers, everyone else wanted a piece of the action. "Social apps didn't exist before you guys. You just created the space."

A few interesting points were brought up. Alter talked about Bebo's current challenge of providing accurate metrics as to exactly which applications are drawing the most activity. Morin teased Facebook's upcoming payment system as a way to help developers make a buck or two. "Social commerce is likely the future of how e-commerce is done on the Web," he said, "so we're working on a commerce engine and enabling people to take payments on Facebook."

Smith briefly addressed MySpace's developer platform, asking Hurff, the News Corp.-owned site's director of engineering, why things had been "taking a bit slower" than expected. "We are taking it slow," Hurff answered as though it were a deliberate choice on MySpace's part. "I expect that to pick up...we haven't had anything bad happen."

Things briefly got exciting when Morin started mentioning Facebook's commitments to data portability--the ability to translate your identity from one social network to the next--and Six Apart's Recordon seemed to take issue. "Our intent is to enable the user to take their data with them anywhere they want to go...it's certainly our intent to enable a user to have access to whatever data they need," Morin explained. It seemed a little bit counterintuitive, considering Facebook's closed-off reputation. "Over the next year we're thinking a lot about how to do that both on Facebook and off of Facebook."

Recordon interjected,"You can't just go out and say we need data portability." Later in the panel, after I suggested via Twitter that he was implying that Facebook's commitment to data portability was all talk, he elaborated. "All of data portability is talk. People need to focus on doing something useful with open standards, and portability will come naturally."

Beyond that, the panel was mostly predictable. The panelists seemed to agree that the art of the developer platform is evolving, and will continue to evolve. Great. We knew that already. One prediction, however, struck a chord: "One of the things that I can see happening in the next year," Chanezon predicted, "(is that) application developers are going to start to open up their own APIs for other application developers to reuse." In other words, a platform on a platform.

That's trippy.

Bebo co-founder Michael Birch (left) in an interview with Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster at the Glasshouse event on Monday night in San Francisco. And a few beers.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

SAN FRANCISCO--It's kind of cheating to showcase the dotcom scene by hosting an event featuring Bebo co-founder Michael Birch and Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster. An outsider, observing Buckmaster's interview of Birch on Monday night as part of the Glasshouse salon series on entrepreneurialism, would get the idea that Web 2.0's scions must all be tall, stylish, and exceptionally good-looking.

That outsider would also get the idea that Silicon Valley had the comic timing of Juno, as it was, for the most part, a witty and borderline tongue-and-cheek interview. Bebo's success, Birch said, was "was mainly due to (his) pure brilliance." Buckmaster then reminded Birch that his site could no longer claim to be No. 1 in the U.K., where it had sat on top of the social-media scene before Facebook passed it in reach.

"You still have New Zealand and Fiji, I know," Buckmaster said at the event, held at an expansive new bar called Orson in the heart of San Francisco's start-up-heavy SoMa neighborhood.

"Fiji is an up-and-coming market," Birch replied.

The witty banter was amusing. But want to know the funniest part? Birch's site was sold to AOL for a monstrous $850 million and the interview didn't even touch upon it until audience members (including yours truly) brought it up.

Rather, most of the discussion between the two was centered on Bebo's raison d'etre and its short history (the site was founded in 2005). Buckmaster brought up server problems that came close to halting the site in the manner of Friendster, and Birch replied candidly. "It was quite challenging," he said. "It kind of grew, and then it stopped growing because it wasn't working very well, and then we would fix things and it would start working again."

The audience additionally learned that the British-born Birch prefers fish and chips to hamburgers and that his biggest headache on the site is the occasional whiny teenager. "I think Bebo's single issue we've had is people being mean to other people and trying to solve these life disputes," he said. "You get these e-mails like, 'Jennifer was really mean to me at school today. Can you cancel her Bebo account?'"

There was also talk of the "Open Media Platform," a strategy Bebo launched to bring professionally-produced video and audio content from partners like CBS and MTV onto the site. "Bebo has been called the first social media network," Buckmaster said. "Is that just marketing hype or is there something to that?"

"It's not just marketing hype, it's incredibly good marketing hype," Birch answered to laughter. "We kind of tried to think how we differentiate, because there's these other two Web sites (Facebook and MySpace)...We have to differentiate, so we thought we'd take the best of both, which was the common utility of one and the media of another, and blend them into one."

He elaborated: "We've always been a much more media-centric site. So where Facebook is openly non-media focused, and MySpace is very media focused, we wanted to become 'media' but in the way Facebook had done it, with the widgets and applications."

Buckmaster also asked what it was like for Birch to work on a site with his wife, co-founder Xochi Birch, and brother Paul Birch. "It's really nice working with my wife," Birch said. "My brother is OK. It's been fine. We're still related. Normally, you start a Web site with friends and it's like, 'Are you still friends?' And often you're not...but (Paul and I) are still related. And friends."

Cute. But what about AOL?

As the event was winding down and the Craigslist exec had only a few questions left, I figured finally they'd touch upon the acquisition. No such luck. "I understand that you had short hair in the U.K., and you only grew it out when you moved to the Bay Area," Buckmaster observed in reference to Birch's shoulder-length locks.

"I always understood it as camouflage in Haight-Ashbury," Birch said.

The discussion was then opened up to questions and answers, and I seized the opportunity to ask the two why neither the term "AOL" nor "$850 million" had surfaced at all throughout the interview.

"850 million is an interesting number. It's a lot bigger than some numbers and a lot smaller than some numbers," Birch responded jokingly. "It's not a prime number." Finally, he addressed the acquisition directly. "There were many other companies (as potential buyers)... It came down to fit," Birch said. More specifically, it came down to AOL's AIM client, which will see deep integration with Bebo. Birch said it offered a much more intimate social-networking experience. "You connect with friends who actually mean something to you, and no one's actually exploited that social graph."

But no matter how press-conference-worthy the questions were, the levity remained. When someone in the back of the room asked Birch where the $850 million valuation at the time of the AOL buy came from, the Bebo founder answered accordingly. "Eight hundred million," Birch said, "was for Fiji."