Reports are abound that AOL is about to pull the pin on once popular social networking site Bebo.

According to the more reputable internet news sites such as the BBC, Huffington Post and the Telegraph, Bebo owners AOL are seriously considering abandoning the site altogether rather than attempt to go through the process of selling it. The 40 remaining worldwide staff have all been given notice.

This has ramifications for not just Bebo users, but all users of social networking sites. Those of us that use them often use them heavily, and they become an extension of real life.

"Bebo, unfortunately, is a business that has been declining and, as a result, would require significant investment in order to compete in the competitive social networking space," Jon Brod of AOL Ventures told employees in an e-mail.

"AOL is committed to working quickly to determine if there are any interested parties for Bebo."

This is huge news. San Fransciso based Bebo was once one of the leaders in social networking, and only 2 years ago it was sold by the startup developers, British-born Michael Birch and his partner Xochi, to AOL for a whopping US$850 million. That is a serious amount of cash to invest into a project to then abandon it a short time later. There have been all sorts of accusations flying around as to why this is. Who would want the site now anyway now that it is on such a serious decline, with remaining members panicing to retrieve their stored information?

This brings me to a crucial point - how much time do you invest into your social networking, and what happens if the site gets superseded by the next best thing. What happens to all of those hours spent building networks and uploading????
This is always inevitable, the superseding, first it was bebo, then myspace, then facebook and now twitter. What to do.......

The Hefty Price of Social Networking.

This is a hard thing to quantify. Social Networking sites are a vital business and marketing tool if used correctly and to their full potential. There are a great number of companies out there currently doing very well for themselves off the back of these sites.

But how much time do you invest into them? Are some sites better than others for your particular needs. Certainly. I would have never thought that a site as huge as Bebo would be abandoned, but the more you look into it the clearer the reasoning becomes.

Once a site like that is in serious decline, it is pretty hard to recover it without the risk of investing heavily in new features and enticements to get users back. Social Networking is all about the networks, and how they are perceived and used. Once the "early adopter" population starts to go elsewhere, the rest will follow. It is just popular kids politics really.

The decline of Bebo is being put down to the rise of Facebook but it goes deeper than that.

From the Huffington Post article:

In an e-mail to employees Tuesday, Jon Brod, who runs AOL's startup acquisition and investment unit, AOL Ventures, said Bebo would need a "significant investment" to remain competitive.

Although Bebo has been in the shadow of rivals such as Facebook, it has been strong in foreign markets, including Britain. AOL wanted to tap that strength abroad to drive traffic to AOL's other free, ad-supported Web sites, especially internationally, while leveraging AOL's instant-messaging communities, AIM and ICQ, to try to grow Bebo in the United States.

There have been rumblings that too many resources have been funnelled into the integration of the AIM software whilest overlooking basic security and the site started getting buggy, and old feeling. I guess this is the problem with all of these sites, they cost so much to run, how do you get them to turn a profit.
For all of the sometimes frustrating changes that Facebook does to the front end integration, one thing it does also do  is make you feel like they are updating the technology, even if it is just a cosmetic change. Kind of clever really. I would imagine they invest heavily in their research to stay ahead of the game.
Keep it fresh and invest in the future or die is the lesson here - we can all apply this to our own websites.

and some more from another site:

Bebo spokeswoman Sarah Gavin says it is too soon to say what will happen to content posted by members on Bebo – including personal information, photos and videos – if the site is shut down, or whether members will be able to retrieve it.

"We're committed to working quickly to determine if there are any interested parties for Bebo and the company's current expectation is to complete our strategic evaluation by the end of May."

Figures from online researcher comScore show Bebo had 12.8 million unique visitors worldwide in February – down 45 per cent on the same month last year – compared with Facebook's 462 million visitors.

Some  really interesting info from these excerpts - Bebo users may just lose everything.
One would think is obvious path they would take, why go to anymore trouble other than just disconnect - these social networking sites dont have a "backup my profile option". To create one at this point would be a logistical nightmare, not to mention the heavy surge in bandwidth as users downloaded their data. This would put a huge strain on their servers, and cost them a whole lot more.

So it seems if you are a Bebo user (and lets face it most of the users were kids) you are about to lose it all. It is like a house fire really, but for a house that was semi abandoned a little while ago as everyone moved to the flashier place down the road.

So it seems that social networking is on the rise, and more and more businesses are using it, but you must keep ahead of the game and use it wisely whilst you can, for tomorrow it may be gone, replaced by something that may or may not meet your specific needs. It pays to use these sites as a supplementary exposure mechanism, rather than rely too heavily on them for providing all of your online presence.

My own personal Twitter experiment has been going well.
It seems that Twitter is one of those growth sites over the past 12 months, the difference being though that it is absolute URL driven, so once your name, or business name, is gone you have to play catchup.
I think it will be a key site in the immediate future so get in while you still can, sign up and secure your user name before someone else takes it, even if you dont use Twitter for now. It is one of those great assets to have up your sleeve in the event that it becomes the next Facebook for people that are even busier than before, and can only manage 160 character updates..........thats my free tip for the week......