Words: Josh Lee
“Sooner or later, everything old is new again,” goes the noted Stephen King line. And, in 2021, a year in which a mauling public health crisis continues to usher us towards taking shelter in the familiar and comforting, Bebo, the social media phenomenon which drew cult devotion during the noughties, is back, according to an announcement on its website.
An acronym for “blog early, blog often,” Bebo’s pulling power – which drew over 80 million unique users — hinged on its quizzes, profile pages that allowed users to upload photos, videos and music, and whimsical features, such as choosing your ‘Top 16’ friends. It was the most used social network in Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, and had, for a single month, supplanted Google as Britain’s most visited site.
The current homepage reads “Bebo is coming back in February 2021 as a brand new social network,” and a quick scroll on Twitter will indicate that the verve for its renaissance is bubbling. However, those looking to access its password-protected private beta will need to be invited to do so. It also states, “All the old accounts are long gone”, and that Donald Trump is already banned from using the website, once it relaunches, mirroring the approach that Facebook and Twitter have taken towards the former president.
Co-founded at the beginning of 2005 by Michael Birch and Xochi, his wife — both serial startup launchers, who have also previously debuted birthdayalarmclock.com, an e-card site, and ringo.com, an early social-media hub — Bebo once vied with MySpace for the hearts and minds of teens and young adults, before the turn of the new decade saw mass migration to Facebook. “I could see the juggernaut coming,” Birch said in 2019, recalling the period in which the soon-to-be king Mark Zuckerberg was on the offence.
Birch revealed that, in 2008, he and a 23-year-old Zuckerberg, had conversed for two hours, before the Facebook co-founder made a verbal, stock-only offer for Bebo. Balderton Capital, the VC behind Bebo at the time, thought that Facebook’s then valuation of $15bn was pie in the sky, and the offer was rejected. Instead, a deal was struck with AOL, only a few months before the financial crisis, with negotiations sealed at $850m.
The Birches invested some of their payout into the likes of image-sharing service Pinterest and meditation and sleep app Calm, before eventually buying back Bebo’s assets for $1m, saving it from bankruptcy, and attempting, several times, to repurpose it. In 2019, the business, which at that point existed as an e-sports streaming platform, was sold to Amazon subsidiary Twitch, for $25m. The Bebo website was then taken offline, but Birch kept hold of the rights to the brand – and has now decided to bring the band back together.
“The temptation was too great” not to revive Bebo, said Birch in an interview with the BBC, relaying that since last March, he has been programming again (having not coded for around seven years), using it as a distraction, given the extra time he’s found at his disposal. In that 11-month period, the 50-year-old has built five websites (Bebo being the fifth), and currently spends approximately 100 hours per week as the social media site’s sole coder, working from his home in the British Virgin Islands.
“The timing now, I think, is a good time to launch another social network… people are craving interaction, and a lot of that, at the moment, is virtual”, he says.
Though the precise details of the design, feel and features of the new Bebo have not been disclosed, Birch has said that his site, although not a carbon copy of the original, would offer a “refreshing break” from the cycles of news and the frequent spread of false information that have come to stain the reputations of Facebook and Twitter. “What we want to do is go back a little bit to this idea of a profile,” he says. “That you have an identity you sort of take pride in. That you can visit a profile and see things that aren’t just the latest news articles being shared.”
The idea, or the main focus right now, is what Birch calls “live social networking.” One example of that in play, according to Birch, is a real-time conversation occurring under a recently uploaded photo. In one sense, it is a return back to the basics of social networking.
Although the build-up to its return is being glossed over with the ever-misleading varnish that is nostalgia, will the comeback site actually succeed? It’s not so easy to predict. There will certainly be a pull on the heartstrings for gen Xers and milllenials — Birch said that even before revealing his plans to bring Bebo back, the site saw one visitor every three seconds, despite being dormant. Moreover, a lack of a never-ending newsfeed filled with suspect or partial articles will be an irresistible draw for those trying to burrow for light in the misinformation quagmire.
However, will those factors be enough to buoy Bebo in a social media ocean in which established names have diversified in order the remain relevant — Instagram has an e-commerce function, for example — and newcomers to the throne — like TikTok, the shortform video app that’s hit over 2 billion downloads — have turned the dial on the landscape?
Then comes the notion of getting back into the game at a time when dismantling Big Tech is firmly on the agenda: US courts are at loggerheads with Zuckerberg; the public are livid with his — and Twitter’s — inability to stamp out the far-right echo chamber; and Parler, the right-wing Twitter-wannabe app where Ted Cruz has a quasi-influencer status, was taken down last month, following the insurrection at the US Capitol (it has since relaunched). Has Bebo caught wind of an oncoming power vacuum in which it can carve out its own sphere of influence, or, like the others, will it eventually be caught up in ignominy?
There’s yet to be a major comment from the world of tech and venture capital, but Kate Bevan, computer editor at Which? says: “It’s probably brave to launch a new social network in this climate when there are concerns about potential harms from misinformation spread on social media, so I hope Bebo will take its responsibilities to look after its members and their data seriously.”
There’s also the obvious issue — if things continue the way they do – of whether a single coder can even compete with the hinterland of resources that Zuckerberg and co. can draw upon.
“This started as a fun lockdown project… it certainly didn’t start out as, like, ‘let’s try and become as big as we used to be.’ But is that in the back of your mind as a possibility? Of course it is”, says Birch. “Do I realistically think that’s going to happen? No, I don’t. But, it’s more fun trying, sometimes, than it is necessarily achieving it.”
Want more social media scandal? Is 2021 the year that Facebook finally gets broken up?
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