yes there was a problem with the AIM for about 3 hours, there were some servers that went down in the data center

It is not “basically just myspace for 13-14 yr olds”. It is mostly targeted at school and college students (mostly under 25). For people who had left school/college before Bebo was created it is not much use for them really.

About your comment “so not suprising then that it’s struggling”; the article suggests that AOL is struggling, not Bebo!
Bebo is still expanding and AOL is trying to get advertising revenue by from it “giving the struggling Internet company {AOL} a foothold in an expanding business {social networking, Bebo}

There are many different categories of people who use social networking sites. They all just haven’t mastered the keyboard as you say.
About your comment on why not “face to face?” well what about when your friends are in a different country or on the other side of the world? What will I do, catch a flight every weekend? Even with some video conferencing tool, Skype or whatever, it is still not very practical because of organising time-slots or even large time-zone differences.

Look at my post (#14 March 14th, 2008 | 01:43) and read the sentences “I still do not condone the way that the man killed the pup. He could have been a lot more humane about it.”

I am in no way trying to downplay what he did! What he did was cruel, I am not arguing with you about that! The pup still needed to be euthanised though! Do you really think if your local dog pound found a dog with a serious disease that they would not put it down?

I was arguing with you about the way you generalised the Bebo community collectively as, lets say, “puppy killers”.

Keep trying to find excuses and downplay what he did, it amuses me.

P.S. For all those people thinking of joining Bebo, just know that they’ll never leave you alone if you quit. Expect a LOT of junk coming through your inbox if you ever go elsewhere.

No, I’m not a grammar teacher and I certainly don’t write dictionaries for a living I’m doing my Masters in Computing now.

I like Bebo very much. I often use it to chat with my friends all over Ireland, the ones I met in Germany and France, my friend from Spain and some other places too. I also use it to talk to my friends who are in Australia.

I think MySpace is more prevalent in the US. I have a FaceBook account but I rarely use it. The only reason I use FaceBook is because it is fairly popular in the UK and I have some cousins and friends there so I use that to keep in touch with them; it is much easier for me to use FaceBook than getting all of them to change to Bebo!!

Yes, I’ve heard of Second Life. I have an account and use it on occasion, perhaps once or twice a week. Some of my friends have heard of it but I don’t think any of them use it. With SL you are represented by an avatar so it is not like it is “you” that the other people are interacting with. I have made some friends on SL but it just isn’t the same as making friends on Bebo. Perhaps if more of my friends were using SL I would use it more often.

A problem with SL is that it is “live” in that you have to be actively participating in the world in order to interact. You don’t get this problem with “normal” social networking sites like Bebo because you can just reply to a message/comment later on.

Another problem with Second Life is that there is some configuration to be done with ports if you are behind firewalls, etc. For example, I know some people who can’t access it because the student village in which they are living only allows certain ports to be used. Obviously you can get around this by VPNing into a proxy machine and use that machine as your internet connection but not many people would know about that.