Social Deluge

The last time I’d written about Bebo was a year back, in the context of AOL buying it, and a tongue-in-cheek suggestion of getting Kareena Kapoor (whose nickname is Bebo) to be the brand ambassador when they launch in india. Recently,Medianama reported that they were launching this month.  According to ContentSutra, they will be talking to content producers in India to further their strategy of ‘conversations around media content’. The Social Inbox also sounded interesting – “a utility that combines Yahoo Mail, Gmail, AOL Mail and Twitter feeds, and also helps users discover content they’re interested in”. I can’t help but remember Rediff’s attempts at Orkut and Facebook integration.

AOL recently said that it was confident about Bebo doing well in the long run, and was for now, concentrating on getting users, more than revenue. In an interview with Paid Content, Joanna Shields, President, AOL People Networks, talked about the AIM client based strategy that gives it a wider reach than say, a Facebook. By aggregating feeds from various networks onto AIM, AOL allows people to be connected with friends’ activities in   sites like Flickr, Twitter etc, even without them being on it. Bebo has been busy with quite a few things recently – Lifestream – a basic Friendfeed like aggregator; Social Discovery Engine – which leverages profile data  to recommend related music, videos and people; Lifestory – puts uploaded photos, events, and (soon) videos into a scrollable, chronological series of postage stamp icons at the top of members’ profile pages. In the long run, Bebo is also planning to allow its users to subscribe to updates from other users, brands, bands, and celebrities, whose updates will then appear in their LifeStory timelines. (via TechCrunch) This could provide revenue opportunities.

In the US, AOL has migrated all its AIM user profiles to Bebo, thereby doubling Bebo’s presence in the US, thanks to AIM’s massive popularity. The Lifestream is now one gigantic feed that will have updates from you and all your friends on Flickr, Twitter and Delicious, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, and the moment you link a service to Bebo, it keeps track of  your new friends there too. And with Social Inbox, the lifestream updates, AIM updates and emails can all land up there.

Now, how good are bebo’s chances in India? The last Comscore report on social networking in India shows that Orkut is far ahead of Facebook, which has BharatStudent, hi5 and Ibibo following it relatively closely. I’m a bit familiar with Ibibo, thanks to their properties that are heavily publicised on TV, but since I’ve never been the target audience of any of those properties, I have never tried out the site. I don’t know about their revenues, but I am not sure if building properties which are quite tactical in nature is a good way to build long term equity for the site. During the tenure of the property, there will be heightened interest and traffic surges, but sustainability is a big question. I also read recently that Bixee, owned by Ibibo has ventured into several verticals – finance, shopping and auto. I’m really not sure where this is heading especially with web 18’s presence in these spaces and several other independent entities who are strong in these verticals. The way Ibibo’s traffic is declining (-50%) I think they need to relook.

There’s definitely a space for another social network, even in what some would call a  cluttered space, provided it differentiates from the existing ones, and gives the user a reason to try it out. I’m really not sure how random invites like the ones from hi5 work. They don’t, for me. While the AIM strategy for Bebo works well for the US market, I don’t think it can work that well in India, (inspite of the GMail connection) though it will give Bebo a start, along with the existing AOL users.

From a product standpoint, the lifestream goes where Facebook still really hasn’t (despite having copied commenting on status messages and the ‘Like’ feature from Friendfeed, and the real time stream from Twitter) – updating friends’ activities on other services in your lifestream. Will that be too much of a deluge for users, we”ll have to see., the Facebook redesign response will give a clue. It also remains to be seen whether Facebook will tear down the ‘walled garden’ and integrate these services quickly, or will only pursue the internal activities+ Facebook Connect way of adding activity feeds. If it does not, the more social version of Friendfeed could prove an irritant for Facebook. The difference maker, however, could be the content tie-ups (Medianama reports this to be the start) and what Bebo will do to ensure that conversations happen around it.

until next time, a new socialite 🙂