Why Do We Bebo?

Lets just be clear from the outset. Bebo, the social networking phenomena that has swept Irish colleges in the past few months, addicting a majority of the student population like a wild vampiric contagion, is a wholly unoriginal idea. The site, although managing to cleverly balance its mixture of advertising, content and functionality, and featuring personalisation options like a selection of ‘skins’ and a space for co-opted (and uniformly copyright infringing) flash content, adds nothing truly original to the mix of bulletin board, interest groups, photo hosting and social resume that has existed since rival site Friendster launched in 2003.

Social networks are hub sites. Alternatives to the generic search, email, and news aggregation of portals like Yahoo, they offer a home for users to post mini biographies, lists of their interests, photos of nights out, quizzes, polls and the like. Most importantly, through ‘buddy’, ‘contact’ or ‘friend’ functionality, they connect users in networks of acquaintance – relying on the ‘small world’ or ‘six degrees of separation’ phenomena to build user bases exponentially. These networks (more than ten of which have currently managed to attract over 5 million subscribers), offer a variety of connection models, from the invite only exclusivity of Google owned ‘Orkut’, to the college delimited privacy of ‘Face Book’; yet all share a dependence for their success on their ability to attract large groups of socially interconnected users.

That Bebo is unoriginal, or is in many ways less powerful and elegant than rival ‘Face Book’, matters little to its legion of fans. For most of Bebo’s growing throng of Irish users, the site represents their first encounter with social networking and blogging, and provides a space for the maintenance of an electronic identity. Where Bebo has found success is in, as much through fortune as cunning, attracting the ‘opinion formers’ of Ogra Eireann’s increasingly socially homogeneous cultural milieu. In a time when college attendees resemble more than ever before, drunker versions of second level students; both in their adherence to O.C dedicated fashions, and their general apathy toward both the political process and traditional avenues of post adolescent rebellion, getting key students on board has been enough to sway the ship.
Bebo takes advantage of what the journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell, in his book ‘The Tipping Point’ describes as ‘Super Connectors’. Such individuals, the party boys and girls who grace the pages of ego rags like Dublin’s ‘Bash’, represent their colleges in intervarsity sports, and organise club nights like the uber trendy ‘Hospital’, have rapidly drawn in their wake the bulk of Irish third level students. It is in succeeding to attract such hip and flighty Celtic cubs, that Bebo inc. has managed to cast its net far wider than MySpace, Face Book, Orkut and the rest of its progenitors combined.

No elegantly original combination of design and ease of use seems to underlie the sites popularity, although Bebo (however garish) is less visually dull than Face Book, less advertising infected and downright ugly than MySpace, and both more intuitive and less exclusive than Orkut. Most likely, its success in signing up bright young things lies in both the growing technological familiarity of the laptop and iPod owning college students of Ireland, and the spam like method by which the site encourages new users to add friends – by importing their entire email contact lists. Thus a host of flattering invitations sent by the glitterati of UCD and TCD student life have tipped the boat, ultimately inducing a critical mass of students, primarily female, to post online their photos, diaries and potentially valuable – should Bebo inc. manage to monetarise them in a more targeted fashion than its current crudely impersonal advertising – social network maps. Other colleges have seen the impact of Bebo's appeal on their computer facilities and reacted by banning the site altogether. NUIG, Carlow IT, Waterford IT, Dublin Business School and Queens have already gone down this road.

Ultimately, there’s little particular or unique about Bebo the site, responsible for Bebo the phenomenon. True, features like a hit counter, publicly visible whiteboard, and easy shortcuts to add user icons and photos, do encourage repeat visits. However rival sites have found comparable success in other markets. MySpace (recently purchased by Rupert Murdock’s News Corporation), which arguably provides more sophisticated customisation features and includes the draw of custom content provided by bands and television celebrities, has had enormous success amongst college students in the US. Search through the users of the US based Orkut on the other hand, and you’ll find a disproportionate number of Brazillians (72% of the total user base). Such geographically arbitrary success bears out the fact that Bebo’s popularity is rooted in the social topography of Irish youth, rather than the sites palate of socially connecting features.

Ironically, or perhaps cleverly, one of the Bebo’s initial technical limitations – till recently, users lacked any form of search facility – effectively acted as what psychologists refer to as a ‘variable ratio conditioning schedule’. By making the discovery of a familiar (or attractive) profile, reliant on unpredictable amounts of link crawling through networks of friends and friends of friends, Bebo effectively conditioned its users to continually surf its listings. The same strategy has long been employed by slot machines to separate gamblers from their tokens. It’s not uncommon to observe Beboer’s in college (and more and more frequently second level) computer labs nationwide, delving several levels ‘deep’ to discover connections, or soak up the every social detail of attractive strangers - in a manner that has become known as ‘Bebo Stalking’.

Speaking of stalking, the lack of a dating culture in Ireland – or more accurately, the bootstrapping of 80’s Catholic sexual repression to naughties Sex in the City sexual liberation, may also have influenced Bebo’s wildfire success. With no way to easily, and unthreateningly, continue a relationship begun with semi-anonymous gropage under the glare and chemical confusion of a club or student pub, exchanging – or stalking – Bebo pages, provides a much needed safe haven for interested students to get to know one another; an oasis, otherwise lacking; in a contemporary ‘dating’ environment with all the hospitality of Mao’s China.
In another sense too, Bebo and romance go hand in hand. All social networks serve a second and less obvious use as online personals. Internet dating, although rapidly gaining mainstream acceptance in the United States, remains anathema among Irish students. Bebo, and networks like it, slyly tick most of the boxes of dating services, minus the implicit desperation, and with the added bonus that potential flames can be vetted through mutual friends, or at least the cursory examinations of the caliber of their friend lists.

Competition for numbers of ‘friends’, page views, comments, and ‘most wanted’ flash content, may keep Bebo at the top of the Irish social networking scene for some time to come. However aspiring network builders need not fear, a rival home grown site, complete with cheeky ‘Bebo Import’ functionality, targeting the right group of movers and shakers, combined with cross media promotion, could and almost certainly will eventually swipe the social networking crown. Especially as it won’t be long before faced with a glut of beboholic students eating up valuable computing resources, colleges nationwide begin one by one to pull the plug on Bebo.

by
Gareth Stack
28th March 2005

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