Widgetize Your Life with Bebo’s Lifestory
Digitizing your life just became more interesting with Bebo’s Lifestory, a new feature that Rafe Needleman, writing for CNet News, says “makes a fancy widget out of your life.”
Lifestory, one of the flashier new Bebo features, is more or less a timeline app for your photos and events. You create a timeline entry, populate it, date it, and presto—it appears in a nice visual space that appears just like a timeline in an audio or video editing app. Pagination and zooming controls give you the ability to focus in on specific time period, or check out a broader stretch of time. Timeline entries can be anything from simple, quick hit events to photo albums.
Lifestory is part of a new feature set released as AOL tries to position its 2008 acquisition as a social networking site similar to Facebook or MySpace, but different just the same due to different functionality. Other new features for this release include a privacy control called the Social Slider, which allows Bebo users to tag every element in your portion of the Bebo universe as appropriate for friends, family, or your “inner circle.” Bebo’s instant messenger and AOL’s popular AIM instant messenger are also being integrated so that AIM users and Bebo IM users can communicate together. According to Needleman, AOL prepped journalists to be prepared for even more AIM updates in Q2, saying “in Q2 we will take this one step further, providing AIM users with a radically new experience for real-time communication with everyone and everything they care about.” Needleman speculates that AIM might be signaling an intent to compete with IM app Meebo.
According to Needleman, AOL is certainly well-poised to grow Bebo into a social network that can compete with the big players in the space—MySpace and Facebook. AOL owns social aggregator SocialThing, the question-and-answer service Yedda, and the widget company Goowy Media: all companies that could provide a fairly robust social network experience. Currently, however, Bebo is a distant third in the social networking space, with 22 million users to Facebook’s 175 million.
By Robert Pothier