well, at least she admits to it; there is very little "original thought" out there, from academia to business — its all on the shoulder of giants.

I think this also goes to show how an idea can hit a market over and over, but until that market "ecosystem" is ready to grow that idea into a hit, well, you are pounding sand. There were quite a few different variations of social networks way before facebook, zuckerburg just hit the lotto on timing.

theres a lot of smart people out there in the tech world, who work hard and have good strategies —- but just like in life, sometimes the difference is a coin toss.

give her credit for seeing the upside; she kept attacking that niche until it hit.

Ringo, their first social site, was an unabashed copy of Friendster. The husband-and-wife team sold that off to Monster, the job-listings site, for a pittance — but a pittance that provided the seed funding for Bebo, which Xochi openly says was inspired by MySpace. Copy early, copy often, sell out. (Photo by Auren Hoffman)

Born on March 16, 2005 as "an innovative and engaging way for people to share their lives, leverage their community and get the most out of their online experience," according to Yahoo's then-COO Dan Rosensweig, Yahoo 360 isn't technically dead yet. But it's proved unpopular enough for Yahoo to try to replace it at least four times with the social networks listed below.

Yahoo tried to replace 360 by offering $1 billion for Facebook in the summer of 2006. Mark Zuckerberg almost took the deal — but then Yahoo CEO Terry Semel scotched the deal by cutting the price. That's when Mark's sister Randi sang "Fuck you, Yahoo, they're going IPO!"

Yahoo began talks with also-ran social network Bebo, reportedly offering to buy it for $1 billion in May 2007. The deal never happened. AOL bought Bebo for $850 million earlier this year.

Less than a year ago came Yahoo Mash, a social network that allowed a user's friends to "mess" with each other's pages like they were Wikipedia entries. Eventually, Yahoo's Terrell Karlsten told Wired in October 2007, "it will become a feature inside other services. For example, it's possible that you'll log into Yahoo Mail and see your profile along with all of your friends' profiles in your contact list."

In November 2007, Yahoo launched a LInkedIn-like site for recent college graduates called Kickstart. But by January 2008, site lead Scott Gatz had already left the company and management began to cut Kickstart's marketing budget because no one was signing up.

It shows that, yes, kids today are using posts and pokes to flirt, but they're also using social networking sites to share sex ed with each other. What's not to like about a new generation of honest, well-informed sluts? And with 93 percent using social-network communities regularly, at least they're faithful to the sites that bring them together.

The stated budget for the series of twelve episodes is $3 million, and the magazine, along with production partner IMG, will guarantee 83.4 million video views on social network Bebo alone — which works out to $35 per thousand, plus whatever Vogue takes off the top. The show will also be distributed on Hulu and Veoh, and on Vogue's online video outlet Vogue.tv, so any views over and above the Bebo number brings the CPM, or cost per thousand views, down for Express.

As one fashionista friend remarked, you wouldn't think Vogue would even let Express advertise in the magazine. Trendy knockoff retailer H&M would seem the better fit. But then I'll be getting enough product placement from the new season of Project Runway.

If we're the shareholder, we're not calmed. MySpace is far more popular in the U.S. than Bebo. Despite that, ad partner Google still can't figure out how to make money off it. Why doesn't Bewkes just admit it? He had other things in mind when he bought Bebo. (Photo by AP/Peter Kramer)

Hot air balloon rides and circus performers. But then it would be difficult to fit either into 1015 Folsom, where the party is being held tomorrow night. As for the rest of Bebo's original employees? They've all left already.

Bewkes has been trying, on and off, to swap AOL and a fistful of cash for a 20 percent stake in Yahoo, which would help CEO Jerry Yang fend off both Microsoft and Carl Icahn. Yahoo executives aren't particularly interested in having AOL's aging Internet assets dumped on them to manage — but they were eager to buy Bebo, particularly Yahoo Europe head Toby Coppel. Yahoo has a deal to sell ads on Bebo in Europe, a deal that most expect AOL to do away with after it expires. Buying Bebo serves to makes AOL more attractive to Yahoo — and if that gets AOL off Time Warner's back, then it may be $850 million well spent.

Somebody said that we were allowed to wreck the house because the birthday girl's parents were getting divorced and there were kids behaving like gangsters from a rap video, throwing stuff around and smashing things. There were chairs, tables, even a TV in the pool.

Seriously, Beboers, If you're going to start sucking up to your new overseers, you should brush up on your corporate culture clashes. The "overlords" line had its start on a Simpsons episode. The Simpsons is produced by an arm of News Corp. AOL is a unit of Time Warner, whose top executives despise News Corp. For maximum obsequiousness, try picking up lines from Friends instead. That TV series was produced by Warner Bros.

• An inability for AOL to monetize more social-networking inventory. According to our sources, AOL's Advertising.com already cannot monetize all the MySpace (NWS) and Facebook inventory it has available.
• Flattening traffic growth at Bebo, which contributes to a sense that AOL is buying it at the peak.
• A 3X difference between the revenue assumptions used to justify the deal to Time Warner's corporate team and the revenue assumptions some AOL senior managers thought were reasonable.
• Belief that the Bebo founders would bolt the moment the check cleared.

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For fast-growing stocks, analysts sometimes calculate PEG, or the price/earnings to growth ratio. Instead of valuing a company on current earnings, PEG attempts to take into account future earnings. Bebo's earnings grew 67 percent last year. That gives Bebo a pricey PEG of 2.38. Google's is running at 0.61 after its recent stock drop. Why didn't AOL just hold onto its Google shares instead of selling them in 2005? That way, it would have at least kept a piece of Orkut.

• Bebo ranked 4th among a custom category of 55 social networks, after MySpace, Facebook and MyYearbook for Feb-08 receiving 1.15% of all U.S. visits to the category.
• MySpace's share of U.S. Internet visits was 67 times larger compared with Bebo and Facebook's share of US Internet visits (among all categories) was 11x that of Bebo in Feb-08.
• Bebo's share of U.S. Internet visits is down year on year. Share of U.S. Internet visits (among All Categories) to Bebo were down 23% last week and down 22% in Feb-08.
• The average time spent on Bebo in Feb-08, was 30 minutes and 26 seconds, more than both MySpace (30m7s) and Facebook (21m0s). The average time spent on the site is flat year-over-year, MySpace is slightly down and Facebook is up 69%.
• 22.15% of U.S. visits to Bebo last week came from MySpace last week.

Dear colleagues,

I've said many times that my vision for AOL is that we become a global, market-leading ad-supported digital media company. Today, we're taking a major step toward realizing this ambition.

We're announcing plans to acquire Bebo, a leading global social media network founded in 2005 that has a worldwide membership of 40 million.

This acquisition is game changing for AOL for a number of reasons. It puts us squarely in a leading position in social media at a time when it's growing at a fantastic rate. It will help power our strategic priorities across the board. And, just as important, by acquiring Bebo we can reclaim our heritage as a leader and innovator in the online community space.

Bebo is a true pioneer of the social Web. And, as a result, it has the most engaged audience and has seen tremendous growth - it's one of the leading social networks in the UK, ranked No. 1 in Ireland and New Zealand, and No. 3 in the U.S. With our AIM and ICQ networks, we will have a powerhouse reaching about 80 million unique users worldwide. Few other social networks can claim that reach.

And by bringing Bebo into the AOL family, under the continued leadership of its President Joanna Shields, we'll be able to accelerate its growth in the U.S., serving consumers here who are looking for the kind of superior social media experience Bebo provides. At the same time, the acquisition will provide us new opportunities to monetize a wider, more global, more deeply engaged audience through Platform-A. (You can read more about the acquisition here.)

In the past year, we've made great strides transforming AOL, through new product and programming launches and upgrades, our rapid international expansion and the creation of Platform-A. The Bebo acquisition, which we expect to close in the next month, supports all these efforts, and puts us in the game in the very important social media arena.

Please join me in congratulating everyone involved in this acquisition.

Randy

BoomTown is simultaneously incredulous and in awe of the way TechCrunch's fanciful story on the Bebo sale yesterday managed to both loudly hawk the rumor and also madly back-pedal away from it: "We put the chances of this rumor being true at a solid 50 percent.

Bebo is small, but there aren't a lot of options left for companies looking to pick up a social network. Bebo is big in the United Kingdom, a large market sometimes forgotten in the Valley. Google's existing social network, Orkut, is big in Brazil and India, and that's it. Buying Bebo would also keep it away from MySpace — with Rupert Murdoch dropping by and Bebo looking for additional investment, anything is possible. Update: Kara Swisher says Bebo's hoping to get a $1 billion valuation in a round of financing, with Google or News Corp. as potential investors, not candidates to buy the whole company.

MySpace has only added 8 million users since last year — and lost users since October. Valley darling Facebook has nearly doubled its user base, jumping from 19 million to almost 35 million users. Live Spaces and Hi5 have lost users, while Bebo and, incredibly, Friendster have added users, though they are still nowhere near the market leaders. The site with the big focus on business, LinkedIn, has more than tripled in size since last year — but shows almost no growth the past 3 months.

Leaving aside December, which is a likely outlier for engagement thanks to the holidays, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 and LinkedIn all show growth between December 2006 and November 2007. Only MySpace and Live Spaces show a drop during that time period — a particularly ominous sign for News Corp.'s MySpace. At 196 minutes per visitor, it's still light years beyond any of the smaller sites. Friendster, which had shown strong engagement growth, up to 109 minutes in October, fell to under 70 minutes in November before plummeting to 40 minutes in December.

As Creative Capital points out, the News Corp. earning announcement next week will give the first insight into the money numbers from MySpace — and we'll know if the slowing growth is affecting the bottom line.

Turns out Blodget, the disgraced stock analyst turned blogger, has a point. And if MySpace parent-company News Corp. shares this view — that Fox Interactive is in trouble because of MySpace's slow-growing worldwide traffic — perhaps its no wonder Rupert Murdoch was seen hanging around Bebo, the social network which is officially "looking for funding" and unofficially looking for a buyer. Here's a look at Bebo, MySpace and Facebook all together on the world stage.

(Photo by jonrawlinson)

Last we heard from the social network, Bebo had just hired a bank in order to find a buyer. A flack soon hushed acquisition talk, saying the company was just looking to get more funding. Murdoch's appearance belies that spin, however.

Why buy Bebo? Three words: Britain, Britain, Britain. According to Hitwise, while MySpace was the no. 10 most visited site in the U.K., Bebo came ahead at No. 7. Murdoch's not known to happily stay in second place, especially in a key market like the U.K.