Amazon's Bebo will be relaunched in February and transformed into a "real-time social network"

The American social networking site Bebo was founded in 2005 by Michael and Xochi Birch, a California couple . At its peak, it had over 40 million registered users, overshadowing MySpace and Facebook . Unfortunately , Bebo had a "bad luck" and not only did it not develop well, it was even shut down for a time, and was finally acquired by Twitch, a game live streaming platform owned by Amazon.

However, according to foreign media reports, the Bebo social platform plans to be re-launched in February this year . Currently, Bebo is in the public testing phase, and only users with access rights can participate in this test.

( Current test page of Bebo official website)

A careful review will reveal that the development path of this social media platform has been very "bumpy".

According to hypebeast , Bebo was acquired by America Online ( AOL ) for $850 million in 2008. AOL 's CEO praised Bebo as "a true pioneer in social networking."

However, as Bebo 's development gradually lost to Facebook, AOL " ruthlessly " sold Bebo to British real estate company Criterion Capital for only $10 million . Due to poor management, Bebo was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2013.

I don’t know if it was out of pity or something, but the founders of Bebo , the couple mentioned above, spent another $1 million to buy back their “own son” and tried to promote its transformation and upgrading in many ways.

However, after several failures, Bebo was acquired by Amazon's subsidiary T witch for US$25 million to develop Twitch 's e-sports business.

But in this last acquisition, Bebo 's founding couple retained a certain say and thought about what untapped market demand for social media existed during the epidemic.

Michael Birch, one of the founders of Bebo , said in an interview recently that he plans to relaunch the social network and focus on personal profiles and real-time interactions between users and friends , rather than focusing on message push like Twitter and Facebook , so that people can get a little respite in a world full of " Fake News " . For this purpose, he spends 100 hours a week writing code.

( Michael Birch, one of the founders of Bebo )

Michael calls the new version of Bebo a " real-time social network ." He said: " When users log in to Bebo , they can see which other friends are online. Users can interact with friends in real time, and can also comment on their friends' profiles. Friends who receive comments will receive notifications, and users can even have real-time conversations under their profile photos. "

Michael is still very proud of the Bebo site. He said that before announcing the planned relaunch, Bebo was still able to attract a visit every 3 seconds when it was offline , but he also made it clear that users could not access old accounts and that Donald Trump was not welcome .

He hopes to combine nostalgia and curiosity to attract more new users and allow people to find friends to interact with on the new website.

Amazon

Bebo real-time social

Twitch