AOL purchased Bebo, a social-media Web site, for $850 million in March. Now Bebo is looking to gain market share against rivals Facebook and MySpace by making it easier to manage communications.
AOL on Wednesday said Bebo is now giving users a one-stop “social inbox” that combines e-mail, social networking, and media recommendations in a single interface.
Specifically, Bebo’s social inbox offers one-click access to Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, and user-selected media favorites such as videos, music and photos. More than 100 million AOL and AIM users can log into the Bebo service using existing screen names. The inbox aggregates feeds and updates from Twitter, Flickr, Del.icio.us, YouTube, AIM and others, so users can see what’s happening in their online world.
Fixing a Fragmented Environment
“People want the ability to stay in touch with their contacts in real time wherever their friends may be across the Web,” said Joanna Shields, president of AOL People Networks. “The current fragmented social-networking environment makes keeping up to date with others increasingly difficult. Bebo’s new social inbox is our first step in solving this problem.”
AOL further identified the problem as a “cluttered social-networking experience” with friends scattered across the Web on multiple sites that require too much time and effort to access. By letting users pool key updates and information from multiple sites in one place, AOL said, Bebo builds on the foundations of social networking to offer an all-in-one destination.
“A lot of people subscribe to a lot of social-networking sites,” said Jeff Zabin, a social-media analyst at the Aberdeen Group. “The ultimate goal is to cut down on the information overload people experience. Anything that tames information overload with the busy worker nowadays should be well received and appreciated. It all depends on how this is executed, how intuitive it is and how…