Just confirming the trend and my previous posts about the Bebo platform. Bebo apps are doing great and spreading fast allowing Bebo to get their much needed momentum to regain some if not all of the relevancy they got to claim last year.
That is why it is very important that their platform is performing well while Myspace platform is still gearing up.
Right now there are rumors about Bebo tried to offer themselves as “on sale”. many have speculated that either Myspace or Google would get to be the first in line to buy bebo for 1 billion dlls.
I think that such choice for a possible buyer are completely wrong, it makes no sense to me why on earth MySpace would want to buy bebo when they are going to invest over lots of money this year to release several localized version of MySpace all around the world.
In the case of Google, they got Orkut and the opensocial initiative, such buy of a social network would be seen as a negative thing and many OpenSocial partners would in turn drop support as an effect including the most important partial partner OpenSocial got that is MySpace. it would also cause a weary attitude for the upcoming Social Graph API they are just testing out.. so i don´t think they would want to spend a billion on a social network that is using Facebook API and resources as the main attraction to their platform when they are doing too much on the social networking front already.
If i had to guess who would be a good fit to buy bebo, it would be AOL. yes, AOL.
Why?, because they need it, they have been reacting lately to the very possible idea of they getting to number 3 if the Microsoft-Yahoo merger goes through. and if that happens having a competitive social networking offering from them is vital to their mindshare. bebo fits the bill pretty well because AOL is still strong in the U.K where Bebo main userbase is at, AOL is also still a player in the European market so having Bebo would make a good way to enter emerging European markets like the Russian web. so if i were AOL, i would go out and buy Bebo and Ask (you need a search engine too) right away to make up a good web strategy for the future of the company.
That way they could integrate previous failed efforts like AIM pages into bebo and sync it with their next MyAOLl release.
Coming back to the issue at hand here, even if the rumors are just that, rumors. i think Bebo got a real opportunity to grow as a social network, i think that the nature of the bebo social network would be a good fit for integrating a Events and party elements you can find in Buzznet, so if they don´t get bought, maybe they should try out that next.
I know this post may read a little odd in here since widgetslab is not Techcrunch or Mashable but i had this post in my mind, so i decided to give it a go.
But you can expect me to be doing this kind of posts elsewhere soon enough.
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