AOL to Acquire Global Social Media Network Bebo

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AOL announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Bebo (http://www.bebo.com), a leading global social media network. Together with its AIM and ICQ personal communications network, the acquisition will give AOL a premier position in the fast growing world of social media with a network of approximately 80 million unique users.

With a total membership of more than 40 million worldwide, Bebo is a global social media network which combines community, self-expression and entertainment to enable its users to consume, create, discover and share content. Bebo is one of the leading social networks in the UK, and is ranked number one in Ireland and New Zealand, and number three in the U.S. Its users are heavily engaged and view an average of 78 pages per usage day. Bebo has approximately 100 employees operating in offices in the UK, San Francisco and Austin, TX.

The deal comes just one week after AOL’s launch of Open AIM 2.0, an initiative that allows the developer community greater freedom to access the AIM network and integrate AIM into its sites and applications, and the announcement by Apple of a downloadable AIM application for the iPhone.

[From AOL to Acquire Global Social Media Network Bebo]

You gotta be shittin' me. First some morons want to add $5 to everyone's internet bill to pay for piracy, even if the user can't spell "P2P." Now AOL, a company that was the symbol of the Web 2.0 sinking ship until Microsoft decided to buy Yahoo out of existence, are blowing $850 million on a god damn website?



WTF is Bebo anyway? I spend pretty much my whole day online, so I expect to have a slightly higher exposure to new sites than say a guy that works at a counter for 8 hours then goes home and surfs for one hour. And I have no clue wtf that site is, except that from reading the press release it is obvious it is some kind of Facebook competitor.



Is it a full moon by any chance and all the dumbasses are coming out of the woods, howling for dumb deals? What's next?



BTW, AOL: I have another site, it is called Veraperez.com. I am willing to sell it to you for 1/1000th of what you paid for Bebo.com. I'll even give you a free USB wireless adapter for the Xbox 360 and an Airport Extreme wireless card if you send me your purchase proposal by COB 4/15.

Photo Credit: Photo by Grant Neufeld, used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.