A message went up on Bebo’s blog today, announcing that they, too, will be attempting to convince users to port the rest of their web activity to the Bebo platform. Bebo says:
“We wanted to make your life online easier by bringing all of the things you care about to one place.
The top part of the homepage allows you to receive email updates from AOL, Yahoo Mail, Gmail directly to your Bebo homepage. Underneath that section, you will see a “changes” area that let’s you see what is going on with your AIM, Twitter, Flickr, Del.icio.us, YouTube and, of course, your Bebo friends. On the right hand side, you will see a media recommendations area which includes all of your subscriptions and stuff we think you’ll enjoy.”
The Bebo press release refers to the new feature as a “social inbox”.
Kara Swisher reports that AOL, which owns Bebo, has additional plans to allow third-party sites to embed its various social networking services.
Whether these changes help Bebo and AOL compete with Facebook, and whether users adopt this approach or some other approach, such as OpenSocial, remains to be seen. What’s important is that the push to allow users to unify various aspects of their social media experience will continue to accelerate usage of social media moving forward.
