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bad ideas

5 social networks Yahoo couldn't befriend

The soon-to-be-shuttered Yahoo Mash is not Yahoo's first failed social network. It's also not its second, third, or fourth. It took one whole hand for us to count Big Purple's failed attempts to get social, either through mergers or in-house development, below. More »

1:00 PM on Fri Aug 29 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
2,726 views, 9 comments

Latest by MagBas: @kimbjo: "Epic Fail"? You must have been watching 3 drunks and a hurricane this weekend. more »

social networks

Science says poking won't make you more slutty

Using social networks to find sex only make kids these days look sluttier. The reality? A new study of 2,000 MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo users aged 16 to 24 finds they're not happy about the reputation. A full 69 percent believe the media portray them unfairly as "sex maniacs." Those surveyed will be happy with the study's results: More »

2:20 PM on Wed Aug 27 2008
By Melissa Gira Grant
616 views, 3 comments

Latest by Lawrence: @tiffanyrules: lol - books. yeah...like the saying goes: those that can do, do...those that can't, teach. more »

Barely legal billionaires insist there's tons more money to be made 21-year-old billionaires in the making? To tell the truth, the youngest Forbes has come up with in the past decade was Elon Musk at 27. That was back in 1998, with only $22 million. Musk's face is more lined, but he still isn't a billionaire, even after cashing out from PayPal's sale to eBay. Forbes at least has some standards — only reason I can imagine Zuckerberg isn't in the piece is because his share of Facebook's valuation is still mostly theoretical. As for Bebo's Michael and Xochi Birch? They're back to their birthday announcement and e-card concern BirthdayAlarm.com, not content with a cabin in the hills at all. (Photo by Ryan Anson/Bloomberg News/Landov)

3 comments

the chart

Worldwide visitors to Facebook up 153 percent in a year

Metrics firm ComScore reports that 132 million unique visitors logged onto Facebook in June 2008, up from just 52 million in June 2007. 117 million worldwide users visited MySpace during June 2008. Its Facebook's first definitive traffic victory, from a source advertisers actually pay attention to, over MySpace. Way down on the list at No. 6 — past the fast-growing Hi5, past still-kicking Friendster — there's AOL CEO Randy Falco's $850 million social network, Bebo, which saw 24 million visitors in June.

10:20 AM on Tue Aug 12 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
417 views, 4 comments

Latest by raincoaster: I only joined up a week and a half ago. No WAY did I hit it that much! Maybe just more »

online video

Vogue's new reality show hopes to bedazzle the Internet

Every print publisher, and especially the glossies, want in on the online-video game. Unlike the text-and-photos Web, where there are more pageviews than media buyers know what to do with, there's not enough slickly packaged content that big brands deem safe enough to advertise themselves on. Condé Nast's Vogue has a new reality show for the Web, Model.Live, which "tracks three models as they navigate casting calls, catwalks and airports for fashion weeks in New York, London, Milan and Paris." It debuts August 19. What you won't see? Drinking and smoking. What you will see? Eating disorders confronted "head-on." That's because this an attempt to reach out to a younger demographic on behalf of the sponsor, aspirational mall brand Express — which sells American women the sequined, screen-printed jeans they love. What's all this going to cost Express? More »

3:00 PM on Thu Jul 17 2008
By Jackson West
463 views, 1 comment

Latest by WagCurious: This is actually an IMGWorld production made for Condé Nast. Now if either Brian Weiss or Jim Gallagher at IMG more »

social networks

British gossips may lose access to juicy stories sourced from Bebo, Facebook

Amanda Hudson allowed teenage daughter Jodie Hudson to throw a birthday bash at the British family's £4.4 million ($8.7 million) villa in Spain, but when pictures like this of underage drinkers passed out on the floor and accounts of stolen jewelry appeared in Blighty tabloids, the elder Hudson brought suit, alleging defamation under the U.K.'s strict libel laws. The fishwraps will hide behind local "fair comment" provisions, which indemnifies the retellers of factual accounts — the problem is, the accounts posted by daughter Jodie and friends to social networks like Bebo and Facebook may have been less than strictly factual. And, of course, the photos are protected under copyright provisions. Which may mean that British hacks might have to factcheck anything gleaned from websites. I can only hope this is one legal precedent that they don't export to the colonies.

8:40 AM on Mon Jul 14 2008
By Jackson West
685 views, 1 comment

Latest by search.scientist: Jackson I disagree. Basic things like fact checking and say........doing your own work should be a minimum standard. What they more »

online advertising

AOL can guarantee your widget 0.04 cents per pageview

For the makers of widgets, those annoy-your-friends applications littering social networks, it's fractions of pennies from heaven: AOL ad network Platform-A has promised Facebook and Bebo widget developers that it can guarantee them "one of the industry’s highest" CPM — cost per thousand pageviews — rates if they sign up for its Widgnet publisher network. A Platform-A source says widgetmakers will get about 40 cents per thousand pageviews. Which is, of course, terrible. "Most [widgetmakers] won't sniff $1 CPMs," AdWeek's Brian Morrissey snarks.(Photo by MrVJTod)

9:20 AM on Mon Jun 30 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
631 views, Comment

Developers, Developers, Developers

Fretful developers aside, the competition knows Facebook is the widget platform that matters

Developers upset with Facebook's antiviral measures tell us enthusiasm for Facebook's platform is waning. Nonsense, says Steve Cohen, the head of platform engineering at Facebook rival Bebo. Earlier this year, Cohen built a platform for Bebo that was entirely compatible with apps built for Facebook. Cohen told Silicon Alley Insider that Bebo's big worry right now isn't that Facebook's redesign will kill developer enthusiam for the shared platform, but that a new Facebook platform will leave Bebo a step behind. Said Cohen: “Facebook really threw a monkey wrench in the whole compatibility thing. If we’re not compatible with Facebook, no one is going to develop for our platform.”

1:00 PM on Thu Jun 19 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
277 views, 1 comment

Latest by Shadowlayer: "If we're not compatible with Facebook, no one is going to develop for our platform." Thats because Bebo sucks and nobody more »

strategery

Bewkes to shareholder: Just pretend Bebo is MySpace

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes's oops-did-I-Bebo-that tour continues. Yesterday at the Deutsche Bank Media & Telecom conference, a shareholder asked Bewkes how $850 million for a third-place social network jibed with Bewkes's claim that disciplined capital allocation is a key priority for Time Warner. According to PaidContent, Bewkes said, “We did make a bit of a stretch." He then tried to reassure the worried shareholder saying, it was the “same thing when News Corp. bought MySpace.” More »

9:40 AM on Tue Jun 10 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
533 views, 1 comment

Latest by Tim Faulkner: If Parsons can beat off Carl Icahn and then turn the company over to Bewkes, Jerry Yang still has hope? more »

crash this bash

You're invited to Michael and Xochi Birch's Bebo farewell party

Bebo founders Michael and Xochi Birch cashed out in the nine figures with the social network's $850 million purchase by AOL. According to the invite for their farewell party, they'll be retiring to a humble, quiet cabin (which, in the Bay Area housing market, should set them back a million or two). What they aren't spending their windfall on? More »

3:40 PM on Wed Jun 4 2008
By Jackson West
2,145 views, 3 comments

Latest by Big John: not reinvesting the windfall in another startup? more »

ringo

Michael Birch's first social networking sellout a blowout

In 2003, social networking was not yet faddish. Michael Birch sold his self-admitted Friendster clone, Ringo, to online dating site Tickle for a pittance. He came to see that as a mistake, and went on to found Bebo, which he sold to AOL for a giggle-inducing $850 million. A cautionary tale for AOL: Tickle, now a unit of online jobs site Monster, laid off most of its employees in April, and informed its users by email over the weekend that Ringo was shutting down for good. (Photo by Michael Birch)

2:40 PM on Tue Jun 3 2008
By Owen Thomas
374 views, Comment

mysteries

Did AOL buy Bebo to tempt Yahoo into a merger?

No one can make sense of AOL's $850 million Bebo buy, not even Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, who is dropping hints that his company overpaid for the social network. AOL CEO Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant, shown here in a deliciously awkward moment with Bebo president Joanna Shields, negotiated the deal in secret, to the disbelief of their underlings. But there's one strategic way in which the Bebo buy makes sense. More »

7:00 AM on Mon Jun 2 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,637 views, 1 comment

Latest by N/A: Since mergers and acquisitions have seemingly devolved into a revenue tug-of-war over the same stupid ads, at least there's hope more »

facebook

Facebook users wreck $8.7 million Spanish beach house

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the D6 conference crowd that Facebook is about allowing people to "share information and share themselves." British 16-year-old Jodie Hudson took the lesson to heart. The Times of London reports Hudson posted open invitations to her 16th birthday party on social networks Bebo and Facebook, advertising it as the""party of the year" with "a lot of alcohol [and] an amazing DJ." The party's location? Hudson's parents' $8.7 milllion Spanish vacation home. From across Spain's Costa del Sol, the people came. They didn't behave nicely. One partygoer told the Times:
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.

10:20 AM on Fri May 30 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
1,547 views, 7 comments

Latest by BobDope: And on the spinsters for temperance website: 'Alcohol users wreck blah blah blah' more »

online advertising

As AOL-Bebo closes, Yahoo loses its answer to Google-MySpace, Microsoft-Facebook ad deals

As AOL closes its $850 million Bebo acquisition today, the biggest loser in the deal — other than the many Time Warner execs who hate the acquisition — has to be Yahoo, which is losing its answer to the partnerships between Google and MySpace and Microsoft and Facebook. When Yahoo won the deal to manage social network Bebo's display and video advertising in the U.K. and Ireland last September, part of Yahoo's triumph was getting an inside shot at Bebo's global business. Bebo CEO Joanna Shields said she was keen to see it happen. Not anymore. Don't expect Bebo to renew its current deal with Yahoo, which expires in September 2009, either.

11:20 AM on Mon May 19 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
335 views, Comment

social networks

Researchers say the kids are alright

Mandatory age checks aimed at verifying users may not do much to protect children on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and other social networks. A task force on the behavior of teens on social networks found that the majority of young people who've actually had sex with adults they met online did so without any sort of deception. Does this mean that men in their fifties no longer have to go about pretending they like Hannah Montana if they want the affections of the underaged? No, it just means they're already onto you, dude. (Photo by generated)

12:00 PM on Mon May 5 2008
By Melissa Gira Grant
427 views, 3 comments

Latest by bigdowro: @sample032: I already told you how I feel about underage ass. more »

acquisitions

Bebo employees claim to welcome AOL bosses, but secretly fear them

Vested employees at social network Bebo, anticipating the massive stock-options payday they'll get when AOL finalizes its $850 million purchase of their employer, have been passing around stickers that read "I, for one, welcome our new AOL overlords." One was so excited that he sent it to Valleywag — and then rapidly thought better of it, fearing that this leak of sensitive information would somehow jeopardize the merger. Such typical Valley groupthink: Yes, little programmer, the fate of the entire company is riding on your shoulders! Loose lips sink acquisitions! More »

5:00 PM on Wed Apr 23 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,276 views, 2 comments

Latest by N/A: maybe "overlords" was a semi-veiled reference to Smithers and Burns? more »

michael birch

Even Bebo's cofounder thinks AOL's $850 million is a joke

Poor AOL CEO Randy Falco. He believes that acquiring the social network Bebo for $850 million put AOL in a "leading position" in social networking. Everyone else thinks the buy was a joke — including Bebo cofounder Michael Birch. Asked at an event yesterday about the purchase price, Birch said, "850 million is an interesting number. It's a lot bigger than some numbers and a lot smaller than some numbers. It's not a prime number." Asked how AOL bid itself up to $850 million, Birch said $800 million of it was due Bebo's popularity in Fiji. "Fiji is an up-and-coming market," the Birch told the crowd. Don't wonder why he's so giddy. Birch and his cofounder, his wife Xochi, earned $595 million on the deal.

8:38 AM on Tue Apr 22 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
1,036 views, 1 comment

Latest by Rick: Obviously can't make a guy funny more »

venture capital

Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen love Lonelygirl15

EQAL, the L.A. Web-video studio which first brought you Lonelygirl15's bedroom antics, today announced it's raised $5 million in funding. The moneymen backing Bree's braintrust include angel investor Ron Conway, Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen, reality-TV producer Conrag Riggs, former Google exec Georges Harik, and Spark Capital. Bree, who made the cover of Wired is gone from Lonelygirl15, having been killed off, but the series continues, as does EQAL's KateModern, which now runs on Bebo. EQAL CEO Miles Beckett and president Greg Goodfried told the Wall Street Journal the company is already profitable, having earned money with product placements woven into plotlines. Sounds more plausible than selling online ads.

9:40 AM on Thu Apr 17 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
721 views, Comment

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