Bebo Transforms into Social Aggregator

Lifestreaming—showing contacts’ activities on sites like YouTube, Flickr and social bookmarking sites onto a social network’s news feed—is the way in which social media and social networking is headed. AOL-sponsored social network, Bebo is making its way towards becoming a social aggregator. It recently introduced an array of aggregation features.

Bebo’s lifestreaming features will automatically import the activity of a user’s contacts on the different services they register, even if contacts aren’t Bebo users. This is made possible by AOL’s use of SocialThing, which it acquired in 2008. According to Mashable, “Bebo is offering support for Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and Delicious. That’s a smaller number of services than the competitors, but the company is hoping that with its unique ability to pull in activities from your disparate friends automatically, it can make up ground”. Although it is unsure whether or not this will attract more users towards Bebo, it is a step in the right direction.