Bebo
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Bebo (pronounced "Bee-boh") is a social networking website, designed to allow friends to communicate in various ways. It has developed into an online community where users can post pictures, write blogs and send messages to one another, and is similar in format to MySpace, hi5.com, Xanga and Yahoo! 360.
The site has over 22,000,000 registered members. It is estimated that about 5 people register every second[1] (although a much smaller number of members are regularly active on the website). Bebo is the 340th most popular English language website, according to Alexa Internet, and the second most popular in Ireland according to the Irish Independent (17th in the UK).[2] In the US, Bebo was the fastest growing social networking site in June 2006 according to Hitwise, Inc.[3]
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Criticisms
Bebo was initially designed strictly as a contact and photo-sharing site, so that users' personal information was visible to all of their friends. After an experiment was carried out by Adams Rants to see how many users would blindly accept friend requests from strangers (and thus divulge potentially dangerous details), Bebo de-emphasised the contact sharing feature and changed it so users must "opt-in" to having their contact details shared.
Bebo has been accused of taking up so much of students' time that campus computers in various colleges and universities are blocked up by students accessing it, at the expense of students wishing to do genuine coursework. As a result, several Irish universities (including NUI Galway ,Galway-Mayo Institute of technology/G.M.I.T., Queen's University of Belfast and NUI Maynooth St Patrick's College, Carlow) and schools have blocked the site. It is still possible to access Bebo via proxy when it is blocked.
Concerns have been raised about potential risks to children from paedophiles accessing personal information contained in profiles. In Ireland, for example, the Sunday Tribune newspaper carried out an experiment whereby a reporter posing as a 13 year old girl set up an account, and proceeded to gather personal information and photos of other teenage girls. A survey of 2 million profiles by Bigulo.com found that 1 in 3 publicly accessible profiles belonged to children under the age of 18.[4]
In March 2006 Norfolk County Council is believed to have become the first LEA in the United Kingdom to order all schools in its authority to block the website from school computers due to it being used for "unsavoury activities".[1]
In various parts of the site, the user may experience errors in pages, such as photo albums not showing up, and links to content on a person's profile displaying the corresponding content from a different user's profile (often that of the previous profile viewed). This is a long-standing problem, but efforts are being made to fix it. [citation needed]
Many have criticized the number of Bebo invitational e-mails sent from the site, which have caused many people's e-mail inboxes to become clogged. However, it would now seem that the number of invites being sent is in decline.[citation needed]
Internal spam is another problem. Some Bebo users send many un-solicited chain e-mails, wasting bandwidth, inbox space and time. These chain e-mails occasionally purport to be from the developers of Bebo, claiming that the recipient's account will be deleted or in some way curtailed unless the chain e-mail is forwarded to every one of their friends. These claims are in all cases false. Bebo has been forced to place a notice in the mail section of the site, reminding users that Bebo will never use chain e-mails as a means of communication. Other popular chain e-mail types are humorous stories, personality quizzes to be filled out, "petitions" for various causes, and e-mails which must be forwarded to avoid bad luck, or some other such superstition.
Bebo set up a new mailing system where chain letters are virtually impossible to send. A person can put any number of their friends into a mail subscription list to send pictures, messages etc to. The receiving person may then choose if they want to stay subscribed to the mailing list. Bebo has also been the subject of criticism with regard to its recurrent technical problems.
See also
References
- ^ BBC News article, March 2006
- ^ Alexa Internet traffic ranking for Bebo.com, 15 May 2006
- ^ Hitwise Inc. Press Release, 11 July 2006
- ^ Survey of underage public profiles 1 November 2006
- UCC Express, March 15, 2006