AOL Buys Bebo

Last week AOL, the Time-Warner affiliated company, not the UK arm owned by Carphone Warehouse, bought Bebo, the third biggest social networking site on the interweb, with around 40 million monthly users over the world. Randy Falco, chairman and chief executive of AOL, said: “Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL’s personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media.”

The deal marks a push by AOL revive itself as a brand, and to grow its social media business, which consists of AIM, a cross between messaging and social networking, and personal communications network ICQ, in a similar vein to the Myspace IM platform, which should have, but never really took off.

Myspace was, of course, snapped up by Sky owners News International, in the days before Facebook became the new kid on the social networking block.

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