In the last few days a long-haired Englishman with a wife and two children received a number of unsolicited and erratically spelt love letters on his Internet homepage. "BEBO IS SOOOO ADDICTIVE! Bebo bebo bebo!!!" wrote Philip Lee, 16, from County Tyrone. "Thnx 2u, I'm goin 2 fail my GCSE's." "Omigod thanks so much for bebo its sooo class!" wrote 14 year-old Danielle Enright. "Bebo rocks!" said Sarah K, another teenager from Ireland.
The object of their affection is Michael Birch, 35, who founded Bebo with his wife Xochi in January last year after they had moved from London to California. In the last year 25 million people have joined it, most still at school. Like Yahoo and Google before it, Bebo is a word that has gone from meaningless to meaning everything to its users in a dramatically short period, and there are so many of them that soon the computerized world may have no one between 11 and 18 who is not a fanatic. Bebo is currently the sixth most popular site in the UK, bigger than AOL, Amazon and bbc.co.uk.
It is part of an Internet phenomenon known as social networking, something which has replaced, or at least supplemented, real-life meeting up. In the real world, social networking often involves travelling, drinking, personal digital assistants and business cards, but the Internet has simplified the process.
Members of Bebo, most of whom learned to use a computer as soon as the bars on their cots were dismantled, can do a lot of the usual Internet things on their Bebo homepages like uploading music, videos and photos, and updating their blog, but for the first time they can do it all in one place.
In the old days, teenagers would tie up the phone lines all night, or amass huge bills on their mobiles. MSN instant messaging -- online written conversation -- changed that, but words alone can get boring in a multimedia age. So imagine the possibilities if anyone of any age could create their own Web page for free, and include in it almost everything that turned them on; and imagine if they were instantly linked to everyone else.
Bebo members can not only contact all their friends and all their friends' friends, but also all the friends of friends of friends. And in this way the Internet is beginning to join itself up.
If you had a couple of spare years you would still not run out of photos to click on and new friends to make. It is like a giant digital chain letter with no downside if you break it, beyond the feeling that maybe you should get out more.
But we don't get out more. Not long ago, most of us felt we were a part of the online community just by configuring our broadband connection, and we were happy to stare passively at screens. But now we are eager to claim part of it as our own, hence the adopted name for this trend: Me Media. And there is no social stigma attached.
Bebo is a relative upstart in the social networking community, but it certainly isn't the last. Inevitably, Bebo has friends: MySpace, Friendster, Classmates, Xanga, MSN Spaces, Yahoo 360, hi5, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Sconex, CrushSpot, Multiply, Orkut, Tagworld, Tagged, Piczo, Mooble, WAYN, ASmallWorld, MyYearBook, Cyworld, ProfileHeaven, Fropper and EveryonesConnected.
Word of mouth
Birch's original Internet plans were aimed at an older age group -- thirtysomethings -- but he soon learned that social networking online depends on finding a focus based on more than age -- a classroom, for instance, or a particular hobby.
"I wanted it to be a place where I could exchange photos and keep in touch with my family in England," he said on June 16 from his home in San Francisco. "But you can't control who finds Web sites popular. Teenagers are always the early adopters online because they have more time on their hands and less money -- and social networks are free."
And so Bebo spread entirely by word of mouth in schools and colleges, to the point where his site now has 100 million page views every day. Bebo is just a refinement of Ringo, Birch's previous attempt at a social networking site that he built in 2003 and sold not long after it reached 400,000 members. And that grew out of BirthdayAlarm.com, a successful birthday reminder service using eCards that currently has 40 million users. Birch bought the name Bebo from someone else.
"When we planned the site, all the cool, short names were taken," he said. "But after we bought it we invented an acronym for it: blog early blog often."
It could be that Bebo and co have nothing much to do with social networking in the established sense. Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Columbia University in New York, recently told the New Yorker that it had more to do with "voyeurism and exhibitionism. People like to express themselves, and they are curious about other people."
That is to say, it's just a basic human instinct.
On a practical level, the real reason Bebo has taken off so fast is because it can be mastered by a 12-year-old. There is no tricky programming to learn, no software to load. You click on a template and receive instant gratification. Friendster was the first of the social networking sites to capitalize on the one-click advances in technology and experience the sort of rapid exponential growth that is crucial to success on the Internet. But Friendster is no longer considered the hippest kid in the playground.
With Bebo, even someone slightly older than the target market will have no trouble joining up. I gave the registration site my first name, and before I could give my second I read: "Safety Tip: If you are under the age of 21 in particular, we strongly recommend entering only the first letter of your last name."
Then it's your age and as much of your address as you want to supply, a username and password, and after that it's the fun stuff -- personal descriptions, what makes you happy and scared, and simple uploads of anything already stored on your computer. At the end you're asked if you want to feature on the main Bebo homepage, which is where I found a 17-year-old student called Kirsty Mackay passing the time online with her friends in Aberdeen.
On her homepage, Mackay expresses a preference for R&B and "chick flicks," and displays more than a hundred photos of herself on holiday and at parties. She told me she had joined four months ago after a friend had seen funny pictures of her on someone else's Bebo site.
"So I went to look, and I found out a lot of my friends had Bebo pages. I thought it was a good way of keeping in touch with friends I may have lost track with over the years without the cost of phoning or texting them," Mackay said.
She said she particularly liked the funny comments people left after looking at her pictures.
The downside
A few hours after messaging Mackay, I went to some friends for dinner. I told them what I was writing about, but they hadn't heard of Bebo. We went upstairs to the computer, and their 12-year-old daughter was on her own Bebo site, communicating with Bebo friends.
Her music preferences were "kelly clarkson!! also that song in titanic rocks! n black eyed peas some of it n sum girls aloud stuff n hilary duff and most of the songs in Grease," she wrote.
One of the wonders of Bebo is that so many people join as themselves, albeit a slightly more glamorous version.
Mackay thought Bebo seemed safe enough as "it didn't have any of your personal details on it."
But in any large open network the risks of abuse are considerable. Anyone can pretend to be someone else. Many schools have written to parents warning of risks, suggesting they should limit the personal information disclosed, and report incidents of online bullying.
"The Web may blur the line between exercises of imagination, fancy and wishful thinking on the one hand, and outright deception on the other," Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn told me. "Then there is the phenomenon of fiction becoming reality, as people contour themselves to the persona they have created, perhaps on the Web."
Birch believes we are only at the beginning of things. Social networking sites "are becoming much more of a utility over time rather than being a pure gimmick," he told the Web site Online Personals Watch.
"They're actually providing a genuine benefit. For example, Bebo is a cultural phenomenon in Ireland. A Beboer contacted us from Ireland and told us that before Bebo, the folks in his small town were not getting along. Then everyone independently joined Bebo, and got to know each other and now there's a community spirit in the town pub that wasn't there before," Birch said.
In other words, young people are exploiting the ideal way of communicating with each other: socially awkward and self-conscious in the real world, fluent in the online world.
Birch secured US$5 million in venture capital funding, an investment that will increase Bebo's visibility in the US, where, compared to this country, it is a lightweight. In two weeks the money will help him launch Bebo Bands, an additional product that will enable members to share their own music online the way they currently do on MySpace.
Cultural on-ramp
It has taken investors and the traditional media a while to catch up with online social networking, but they are now increasingly eager to take a slice of a hugely lucrative market. Two weeks ago YouthNoise, a network of young people interested in social change with only 120,000 members, raised US$2.5 million in funding; two weeks earlier Friendster raised an additional US$3.1 million.
With one swoop, investors and purchasers acquire what media people like to call "a cultural on-ramp," an entree into an expressive and affluent young world, a world traditionally suspicious of voyeurs and multinational conglomerates. As with established media, the money to be made comes from advertising.
On Bebo there are no adverts on a user's homepage but as soon as you click on the photos or your mail there are enticing links to Sony and Nokia.
Bebo remains privately owned. Not so MySpace, which last year was bought, along with its parent company, by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for US$580 million. At the moment this looks like the bargain of the century. In April, Nielsen NetRatings recorded 38.4 million unique visitors to MySpace, up from 8.2 million only a year before. There are more than 80 million members.
MySpace made headlines in Britain a few weeks ago when Sandi Thom, a Scottish singer, had a No 1 single with I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers in My Hair). Her success was a triumph of how to advertise to young people without making them feel they're being sold anything. "Viral marketing" is the digital version of word-of-mouth.
The Arctic Monkeys also established themselves on MySpace. Thom was not an unsigned singer when she broadcast via her My-Space site from a basement in south London but created one of those strange social phenomena in which tens of thousands of people believe simultaneously that they are the first and only ones to discover something new and "real." In fact, EMI had sent hundreds of thousands of e-mail flyers in advance of the Web cast, alerting a potential market.
But MySpace is far more than an advertising billboard; or, rather, it is an advertising billboard for everyone. A search for bands beginning with S will throw up Same Time Tomorrow (rock/emo/pop), SRT (punk/rock/Christian rap) and David Sinclair (rock/blues), the latter a three-piece unit led by the experienced music writer for the Times, the Independent and the Word.
Sinclair is 53, and was happy to find that MySpace was not just for people with acne. He joined last September, and his songs have since attracted more than 1,300 plays.
He has also found that numbers at his live shows have swelled with MySpace members.
"`The community of dads' bands is normally quite hidden, but on MySpace there are hundreds of thousands of them," Sinclair told me.
His 16-year-old son's band, Ophelia, offering extreme death metal, is also on there, and is listed among Sinclair's 145 "friends," alongside the most famous dads' band of them all, the Rolling Stones. The Stones have four free tracks on their MySpace page, including Satisfaction, which has attracted 158,472 plays.
"I don't think Mick and Keith are actually on there every day," Sinclair said, "but they have someone very good doing it, and they are good at sweeping away any unofficial sites very quickly."
"I'm not sure if any record company will take any band seriously now unless they're on MySpace," Sinclair said. "The only person I've found who isn't on there is Chris Rea, and I think that's a mistake on his part."
It is not clear what Murdoch intends to do with MySpace, apart from putting on some more big adverts, possibly for his other traditional media outlets, and then leaving well alone. For nothing will upset its free-thinking members quicker than a feeling they are being overseen by a multinational. Earlier this month, Billy Bragg withdrew his music from his My-Space page, claiming that a legal clause meant that News Corp could claim royalties from his songs. Messages were being sent around MySpace titled "Run! Save yourselves! Rupert Murdoch is after our content ..."
News Corp denies such intentions, but last week displayed other plans: MySpace launched MySpace Careers, a link to the Simply Hired search engine that promises 5 million job opportunities. A few weeks ago MySpace announced that in the US it will sell episodes of its (Murdoch-owned) Fox TV series for US$1.99 per download. It is clearly impossible to own a site with many millions of members without trying to take money off them.
In one sense, MySpace is nothing new. More than 20 years ago members of the Well, a wired community around San Francisco, began posting their details and opinions on an online bulletin board. What is different now is the scale. Most Bebo and MySpace users would not consider themselves netheads, far less nerds.
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