Bebo

Bebo is a social networking website launched in 2005. It is owned and operated by its founder Michael Birch who took over from Criterion Capital partners in July 2013.

Bebo was founded by Michael and Xochi Birch in January 2005 at their home in San Francisco. The website name was bought by the founders, and the back ronym “ Blog Early, Blog Often” was invented to answer the question of what the name meant.

Each Bebo User receives a profile, which must include two specific modules: a comment section where other users can leave a message, and a list of the user’s friends. Users can select from many more modules to add. By default, when an account is created the profile is private, which limits access to friends specifically added. On February 22, 2007, Bebo Authors, also known as Bebo Books, was launched. On this section of the site, authors can upload chapters of their books and also get them reviewed with a certain module.
On July 10, 2007, the “Group” module was added to pages. This enabled people to view groups which were previously joined to a school and were also viewable to school members Bebo also gave an option to convert existing Authors or Bands to Groups. This conversion takes up to 24 hours as the profile must be manually changed by a member of Bebo staff.

A new service called Bebo Chat, was launched with several other updates in 2011, which allows users to chat to other users. Using a Meebo chat plug in,  but with Bebo branding. Users can also update their ‘Saying’ and show their availability status, as well as have access to other links to Bebo’s pages, and special offers.

Bebo is known to run on servers running the Resin Server whilst making use of the Oracle Database system. It is estimated that Bebo has somewhere between 5000 and 8000 Phantom 4 servers provided by Packable Systems  and over 100TB of disk space across all of their servers.

The website, at its height of popularity, overtook MySpace to become the most widely used social networking website in the United Kingdom, eventually registering at least 10.7 million unique users. To a certain extent, Bebo is used for role-playing characters from various televisions programs, movies and profiles are created and maintained by individuals, similar to a virtual world profile.

Examples of the more common fictional chronicles mimicked on the site include Star gate, the Twilight Saga, The Vampire Diaries, One Tree Hill, Supernatural, Harry Potter, James Bond, Merlin, Gor, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Torchwood and Doctor Who.