Bebo: Yet Another Service Biting FriendFeed’s Style

After purchasing both the Bebo social network and the SocialThing data aggregator last year, AOL’s strategy to leverage and merge these services is beginning to become apparent. Both Facebook and MySpace, currently the most popular social networking sites, have already jumped on the lifestreaming bandwagon. For FriendFeed fans, it’s hard to miss the fact that these major networks are swagger-jacking.

Taking Data Aggregation to Another Level

Using the power of SocialThing (previously covered here), Bebo is now able to pull in updates from all your social services. It will even grab updates from those you follow on those services. This takes lifestreaming on a social network to a whole different level. Now, you can monitor much of your social activity and the activity of your friends all in one place. This is almost like FriendFeed’s imaginary friends feature, but the imaginary friends are created for you automatically.

Your Lifestory

Another feature worth pointing out is Bebo’s Lifestory. It basically takes your photos and updates and creates a fancy side-scrolling time-line. When I first saw it, it reminded me a little of Plurk. This could be a very useful tool to see, at a glance, what’s going on with your friends. It’s definitely a departure from your average top-down.

How Will Bebo Compete?

Bebo has a long way to go if it plans to compete with Myspace and Facebook, but they say this isn’t actually their goal. AOL soon plans to switch AIM Profiles over to Bebo, which will bring them a massive amount of new users and possibly stimulate interest in the service again. Any service that helps us manage the onslaught of information we receive on a daily basis is already ahead of the pack, but it will be interesting to see if these new features will be enough to keep Bebo in the running.