Comscore’s results for April are showing BEBO as number 15 in the top 20 online properties for UK visitors – Myspace isn’t even on the list. BEBO generally has a fairly young audience.
It’s pretty much a copy of Myspace – but one of the better things about BEBO is that it has a much cleaner look to it. Its simplicity works well, and its functionality fits in nicely between facebook and Myspace – Big buttons, and sections for music, video, blog and friends – There are a few additional widgets that you can add into BEBO such as a ‘slide’ or a countdown timer, but overall its pretty minimal – just keeping users focused on the basics. BEBO introduced a bunch of new features last year to help moderate and reduce spam and cyber-bullying which is always a good thing, especially when your site is so popular with the younger audience.
Just like Myspace, advertisers have been quick to get those fake profiles up and linked to. Ponyfriends is an example, dozens of fake profiles added which are directly related to an Eidos pony game on the Nintendo DS. They’ve even spent the time to update the blog and friends section. In typical TV style the new series of big brother’s also got its own profile here

The UK’s love of Bebo could be coming from the desire to make a social networking site its own, when Orkut was launched it was designed to compete directly with Myspace and facebook, it turned out to be mostly used by South Americans who basically made it their own. Whether it’s Myspace fatigue, or the desire to be on the same social network as everyone else BEBO is only as strong as the number of people using it, and it looks like the user-base is just starting to slow down in the UK as Facebook catches up.

Facebook, has seen some changes and is quickly rising in popularity in the UK, getting closer to the top 20 list, and comscore estimates that there are 3.69 million people in the UK currently using Facebook.

Here’s some of the things I like about Facebook, and things i believe are really contributing to its success:-

The look
It has a relatively clean look to it compared to the vomit inducing backgrounds and hideous music that are plastered all over Myspace which would otherwise hamper the browsing experience. There’s also a fairly minimal amount of advertising space on Facebook compared to myspace (indicating that they’re going to have to either increase this in the long term, or sell off all that valuable user data).

The Use
Incredibly easy – Let Facebook search your email contacts, or just search for a Workplace, School, College or Uni, and you’ll find friends ready to add to your profile.

The Extras
It’s closed but it is also incredibly open – you have to have an account to view full Facebook profiles, helping to create a sense of being part of a network once you’ve joined and start looking for other people. It’s open – allowing you to feed in content from pretty much any source (including your own blog like this). It has masses of pre-written applications that tie into it. It makes it very easy to view your friends ‘status’ (like twitter). Facebook is about to get a whole lot more open, changes in the coming months are going to allow even more ways to get your content into your facebook profile using the facebook api, things on the Facebook front are set to get very interesting.

The Marketing Test
A lot of people have been put off social networking sites due to the massive increase in marketing spam, fake profiles, and fake networks. So far Facebook hasn’t become too polluted – yet. Rumors are that Yahoo will probably buy either Facebook or BEBO as the social networking space becomes increasingly competitive – when that happens we could see a drastic change in increasing commercialization of either site, and if that happens users could begin to jump ship to the next big social networking site.