AOL makes a final bid for popularity

IN A LAST BID for some kind of popularity AOL's Bebo social network is getting a new 'social inbox' feature which will aggregate the activities of its users and their friends.

This service will not mind which network the user or friend is in, which is hardly surprising.

This is no original concept, as you will have heard of FriendFeed and Facebook's ability to take in a lot of feeds from other services, yet AOL reckons Bebo's service will be different.

The difference here is that friends won't have to join the service for you to see their updates. All updates will be placed in the Bebo inbox.

Let us give you an example, if you give Bebo your Twitter ID, all the updates from the people you're connected with on Twitter will appear in your Bebo inbox. Exciting, isn't it.

Much like, or perhaps we should say exactly like, Facebook, Bebo's service will have an embedded instant messaging function using the AOL instant messaging service.

Social Inbox will also act as a limited outbox, allowing you to post comments back to some of the originating feeds. AOL is also working with various standards and social network companies directly to enable the two-way links.

This service will also give users content recommendations based on what their friends are looking at most.

"We're not going to try to guess what you are interested in," said AOL's senior vice president of people networks, David Lui.

The company is looking at supporting Google Friend Connect for log-ins in the future, yet for now you will need a Bebo or AOL ID.

AOL desperately wants to become more popular in the US, "The strategy is to convert AIM users to Bebo," Liu explained.

Some of the new aggregation features of this new yet completely unoriginal service won't be online until January. µ

L'Inq
Cnet