In the next few weeks, online social network Bebo will announce the appointment of a Chief Security Officer for Ireland and the UK. It couldn’t have come at a better time for the company.
Over recent months, the Irish media has picked up on the phenomenal success here of Bebo. But it has also focused attention on the less desirable elements of the site, from the posting of libelous material to the sheer amount of time teenagers can spend on it – and the havoc that can wreak on their ability to study. Indeed, if some of the more sensational stories were to be believed, Bebo would rank up there with binge drinking and crack cocaine as something to be stamped out by the authorities – and quickly.
So let’s begin with some facts: Bebo was set up by British entrepreneur Michael Birch and his wife Xochi in 2003. The site allows people to set up their own personal pages, build a profile (or alter ego) and link to an online community of friends. It's both useful and cool, in that it merges the functions of email, instant messaging, chat room, blog and virtual text messaging - hell if you're using a Windows PC, it can double as a telephone via Skype. It's popular because it's good – and it works.
Its progress has been such that it now offers a serious challenge to MySpace, the number one social networking site on the worldwide web. Bebo is already ahead of its rival in the Ireland, UK and New Zealand, and is growing strongly in the US. It may be only a matter of time before it grabs the No.1 spot in America.
One of the strategies successfully adopted by Bebo involves targeting schools. As a result, a high proportion of Bebo users are in their teens. Bullying in the playground is a fact of life, but it seems to have taken a new form with Bebo and similar sites – or so the plethora of media reports suggest.
There may be an element here of adults attempting to impose their own world view and standards on teenagers. That said, bullying is an issue – and, where Bebo is concerned, the system has certainly been abused. False pages have been posted in people’s names, attributing to them all sorts of depredations. Enemies have been accused of doing bad and shameful things. Libels have been published, passed on and turned into accepted wisdom. The internet is a place where people can be nasty and vindictive and in this regard it would be foolish to expect teenagers to be any different.
It's against this background that schools around the country have begun to clamp-down on access to Bebo while students are on the premises. Wrong-footed by the phenomenon, school authorities are making the rules up as they go along. Teachers are fumbling around for guidance. Even universities such as NUI Galway and Queens University Belfast are banning the site from their networks because – they say – of the strain it's putting on their resources: it seems more than a few university students who like to spend their time planning their social lives on Bebo rather than studying.
Inevitably, politicians have also begun to enter the fray. The Fine Gael spokesperson for Education and Science, Olwyn Enright, believes that the government is dragging its heels and failing to act, in effect giving free rein to a ‘new form’ of bullying.
“I don’t think schools have the skills to deal with it,” says Enright of the phenomenon. “They’re used to schoolyard bullying but the guidelines that are there are old. A lot of those were devised years ago and don’t apply to internet bullying. And you can’t just expect a teacher or school to be able to deal with that. It needs a different approach.”
Fine Gael wants the Minister for Education, Mary Hanafin, to draw up a national anti-bullying strategy, to include internet bullying, as well as homophobic bullying (which she believes is also on the increase).
She has no doubt that cyber-bullying is a real phenomenon – and is urging schools to take tough action against the bullies.
“If the behaviour is severe enough to really intimidate another student, I think schools have to take tough action on it, because they have to send out the message that it’s wrong.”
However, not everyone accepts that there is really a problem – or one meriting the kind of fire and brimstone we’re currently being subjected to, at any rate.
Bebo Vice-President Jim Scheinman insists that the issue is being over-stated. He says that Bebo users are good at keeping their online communities clean and are quick to report any inappropriate comments or pictures. He emphasises that you need to take a realistic outlook on the online activity of teens generally.
“They’re the ones who are cursing at each other and showing Maxim magazine pictures to each other – that’s what they do,” he reasons. “If it’s offensive to some of the members and they report it, we’re going to take it down. But if it’s not offensive to their own group and it doesn’t violate our terms of service, we’re not going to bother with them.”
The onus therefore is being placed on the teenage users of Bebo to regulate their own online communities, using the tools that Bebo has provided. There is, for example, a ‘Report Abuse’ function available on every homepage.
There is a delicate commercial balance here that Bebo is trying to negotiate. On the one hand, it's in Bebo’s interests to keep parents and teachers happy. The less worried they are about the site, the more likely they are to let their kids use it. And the more kids use it, the more ads Bebo will ultimately be able to sell. But if, to keep adults or the authorities happy, they have to intervene too frequently, or censor too heavily, then the network will quickly lose its appeal.
Social networks are big business in the making, and ads are where they will make their money in the long run. Though many of them, including Bebo, were set up as small businesses, major corporations are now looking at them as the future of the web and have started to spend big money to snap them up.
In July 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought Intermix, the parent company of MySpace, for $580 million. At the time, many questioned the logic of the Australian media baron’s investment. After all, MySpace was just a few years old, and though it was undeniably popular, there were concerns it would turn out to be just a fad. But the site has continued to grow.
It might not be a coincidence that Bebo was relaunched around the time that Murdoch was taking out his chequebook for MySpace. What had once been a service mainly dedicated to sharing photos now became a full-blown social network. And just a few weeks ago, with Bebo’s impressive growth continuing, the first major investment took place.
Benchmark Capital, a venture capital company with offices in Silicon Valley, London and Israel, invested $15 million in Bebo. That might seem like small beer, given the size of the MySpace deal, and the fact that Benchmark control a $3bn in funds worldwide. But don’t be fooled. This is early days for Bebo, and early days for investment in it.
As part of the deal, Irishman Barry Maloney, formerly chief executive of Esat, will now sit on the Bebo board. Maloney will be helping Bebo with issues like recruitment and expansion. “The typical type of things required to build a company,” he says.
And Moloney makes it clear that Benchmark wouldn’t have invested in Bebo if they didn’t believe the site would be profitable. “We’re venture capitalists,” he says, “we’re not in the business of giving people $15m dollars of our money, if we didn’t think there was an opportunity to make money there.”
Jim Scheinman says that while they’ll listen to what Benchmark has to say, Bebo’s founders will maintain control of the business. But they won’t rule out selling the company at some stage in the future. “We’re not building the site to sell it,” he insists, “but of course there’s a price for everything…and if it makes strategic sense for us at some point down the road, we certainly would entertain the right offers.”
For now, though, the focus is on further developing Bebo. “When we achieve our goal of being number one in our market, we can look at what the next step is,” he says.
Scheinman thinks that Bebo provides a great opportunity for companies to reach young people. He admits that advertisers haven’t adapted to online marketing just yet. “But once they get it, it’s going to be very powerful and effective.”
Following suggestions from Bebo users, the site is launching a bands and music feature, meaning that it now offers everything that MySpace has to offer. Bands will be able to upload their music and share it among other Bebo users.
Jim Scheinman observes that if Bebo wants to keep making money it has to listen to what its users want: “Our goal is to just continue focusing on what our consumers are asking for. If we do that, good things will happen.”
Bebo dos and don'ts
1. Be careful about adding people you don’t know as friends. There is a temptation – everybody wants to increase their friend count – but it can turn out to be a bad idea.
2. The same goes for posting personal details on your page: no addresses, no phone numbers, no email addresses. You might trust your friends, but if you put the information up there, other people may access it.
3. Be careful. Think before you post something you wouldn’t want your parents or boss to read. And remember: slander is slander. Imagine what you’re posting is going to appear in a newspaper – would you be able to stand over it?
4. If you’re posting photos, always consider the other people in them. Especially if they’re drunk – would you like someone to put pictures of you being tired and emotional online?
5. Don’t forget – Bebo is no replacement for real life. There is an offline world too – with parks and cinemas, sport and books, live gigs and sunshine. Try it.