Be-​​boom or bust — the ingredients of a social network

Michael Birch, the founder of bebo.com, is urbane and witty. He laughs easily and nat­ur­ally. Dammit, I’ve seen pictures of him and he’s attractive, too. I’m hot and sweaty as the sun pours in through the window behind me. My gelled-​​up hair has flopped. I’m at an imme­diate and lasting dis­ad­vantage but try to pretend I am Bob Woodward — the Robert Redford version…

Were you offered $552mn for bebo.com yesterday?

I wish it was true. I’d love to say that we had been offered that much, but unfor­tu­nately, no. Michael Arrington cites sources close to the deal, and at first we thought it was BT. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s not implaus­ible, I think. We do about half the page views that MySpace did when they sold so you could argue that it’s worth that sort of price. After all, the MySpace sale has been called “the deal of the century”. Yes, it would be terrible in the future to be remembered as the man who turned down half a billion. I can see why other news sources believed it [including this one]. Arrington is reliable and must have had what he thought was good inform­a­tion.

Why is social net­working so popular?

The core of it is that it is addictive. When you first launch, it’s very boring. Then people start to connect. Then they start offering more and more of their own content. Looking at other people’s pages becomes a slightly voyeur­istic thrill. Then before you know it, there’s so many people creating new content and offering new links that you have a “click­stream” — there’s always some­thing new to offer. If you go away a few days, you come back, and there are messages and new things to see.

How do you create a social network?

It isn’t rocket science to do. What’s hard is creating the traction. Good tech­no­logy is very important, but being able to dif­fer­en­tiate between those tech­no­lo­gies is more important still. Before bebo, we had a site called Ringo, launched in 2003, and that’s where we learned how to do this. We were hot on the tale of Friendster, launching two weeks before MySpace, I believe. Before long we were a sizeable player. We had 400,000 users. But we weren’t making any money. Our only options at that point were VC money or to sell it. As it turned out, we had three options within a week to sell it.

We learned a lot from Ringo when it came to the tech­no­logy. We threw features at it. But as we looked at it we learned that only 10% of our users were using those features. So basic­ally we learned how not to scale a social network. Every user takes a hit on the database, and the more you com­plicate things, the greater that hit will be.

How did you launch bebo?

The original bebo wasn’t really a social net­working site. It was more of a cross between an online contacts database (e.g. plaxo) and a picture hosting site (e.g. flickr). Then we looked at what users were doing and tried to enhance those things and the result was bebo, which was relaunched in July 2005. That’s when we intro­duced the things that would really identify us as a social network, home pages and profile comments and so forth.

Those things seem to go down well, since we now have 25mn users, but for the first few months, we were just chugging along. Everyone was keeping their stuff private and so we had 3000 private web pages. Then the first few people started making their stuff public and the whole thing just took off. Interestingly, we never bothered telling our old users about the new features. If what they wanted was a private web space, then that was fine, but new users took to it like a duck to water.

We tend to find a craving for variety. We need to intro­duce a new feature every couple of weeks. Basically, we have to keep evolving it in order to keep the site attractive.

Bebo is geared towards school­chil­dren. Why that demographic?

It’s actually kind of a ste­reo­type that we are geared to children. We don’t delib­er­ately do that, it’s just pigeon­holed that way. Our original inten­tion was to aim the site towards people with young children. In Ireland, the average age of our users is 19, and as the network ages, so will our users, so the children tag will no longer apply.

At the time we launched, the youth market was a very com­pet­itive market space, and we had the choice to either be part of that or not. But really, the inten­tion was, and is, to target adults in their 20s or early 30s.

Next week, we’re launching bebo bands, intended for unsigned, indie groups. That isn’t aimed at children. And going forward, we’ll be launching night­life and social life features more aimed at young adults.

One possible weakness in a youth site based on advert­ising is that they don’t have credit cards, so can’t respond to adverts?

They don’t have a credit card, but advert­isers really want to reach these people. We have to moderate that really care­fully to make sure that the adverts aren’t manip­u­lating our users. 50% of teens in the UK use social net­working sites… there are many brands that want to reach them, and how exactly are they going to do that?

Moderation is an chal­lenge I wanted to raise. Child safety is clearly an issue?

It’s a big element of what we do. We’re just setting up a customer service centre in Texas to do just this. Historically, our approach has been reactive, but we want to be more pro-​​active. You can block members from ever having access to your page or details again. You can send com­plaints to the company, but there is more to be done.

We have just hired Dr. Rachel O’Connell, who worked at the Cyberspace Unit at the University of Lancaster. She’s spent the last eight years studying the beha­viour of pred­atory pae­do­philes. She has the title of Chief Safety Officer, and will have the power to change company policy — that’s one of the con­di­tions on which she joined us.

On the other hand, I believe a lot of what you might think about pae­do­philes on the internet is media hype. We have 25mn users and not one registered case of this hap­pening. What does that tell you? It’s another reason that we want more adults, espe­cially parents, on our network. As soon as they get past the news head­lines and under­stand what this really is and why people like it, then so much the better.

Another chal­lenge is people leaving for the ‘next best thing’. Doesn’t that worry you?

*Chuckles* If I said “no”, then our current attempts to displace MySpace in the US would sound a bit hypocritical.

There is a big barrier to leaving any network in that all your friends are there. So what happens is that people never really leave. They start fre­quenting other networks. This happens all the time. Your chal­lenge is to keep evolving, keep making your network as attractive as possible; keep giving them reasons to come back.

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