If you’ve scanned the social networking news recently, you’ve probably noticed that many non-Facebook social networks are losing traffic, and a lot of them are shifting direction towards games.  hi5 acquired Big Six games last week and Bebo launched a dedicated games section late last year.  MySpace has been losing traffic steadily for years,  and their June 2009 staff cuts and re-emphasis on music, games and applications failed to entice users back to the site.  Tagged.com, measured to be 2.65% of the US social network market, integrated with the ourWorld games portal this week.  Can these moves help these social networks turn into social gaming networks and compete against the plethora of  social games available on Facebook?
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Bebo Games has officially launched this week, with the company reporting successful numbers for developer and user interest. Bebo Games are offered through several partnerships with game developers, and the top-down approach taken by AOL-owned Bebo means a more uniform game experience for end users.

What Bebo has done with its game platform is integrate it with several of its existing features, such as chat, messages and other forms of notifications. This means that users can do things like challenge other users to a game directly from their chat window. It also means that developers have more immediate access to users for the purpose of encouraging them to return to their games.
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Bebo has taken a cue from Facebook and has created a competition around the applications on its platform. Today the social network announced the winner of its “Engage to Succeed Today” contest, which sought out the five most engaging new applications on Bebo. These winners will receive promotional status on Bebo. The grand prize winner, however, receives a prize from the contest’s co-sponsor, the Sun Startup Essentials program.

That grand prize winner was Bowling Buddies, an app built by Playfish Games. Nick O’Neill claims that he has been addicted to this game for the past week on Facebook. The other top four apps to gain recognition were Solid Sudoku, Robokill Trainer with J2Play, Banangrams and Kick Mania. The response Bebo received for this contest aimed at its developer community was pretty good, with over 2,000 applicants.
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After shutting down its own video upload service and recommending Motionbox as an alternative, AOL has managed to find a way to actually partner with the company it suggested for video uploading and sharing. Motionbox has a new partnership with AOL’s recently acquired social network Bebo, to provide video storage, publishing and sharing services to its users.

If you’re a Bebo user, you may have noticed the transition messages via email and on Bebo’s website for the past month or so. Those that choose to use the new Motionbox-powered video services will be able to access basic membership features, enabling them to use online editing tools, secure storage and sharing options.
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Yes, Bebo has joined the ranks of the larger social networks out to take your soul. Yesterday’s announcement from Bebo revealed its new Social Inbox, which not only lets you log in using their AOL and AIM credentials, but will aggregate social feeds, mail and media recommendations from a host of services including witter, Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL (of course).
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Last night Bebo announced a new program for developers which rewards them with more exposure. The announcement came on the same day that Facebook announced the voting round for the fbFund which will reward applications with $250,000 each for the five finalists. If you prefer the LiveScribe Pulse Smartpen over $250,000 from Facebook, then I highly recommend checking out the Bebo competition.

I don’t mean to give Bebo such a hard time but announcing the competition on the same day that Facebook announces a new round fbFund doesn’t seem like such a great idea. Bebo isn’t slacking on their platform development though. Yesterday the company demoed new metrics and engagement tools. I’ve reached out to Bebo for comment on what the new metrics are but have yet to hear back.

It’s clear that Bebo is taking their platform seriously, and while application traction may not be as high as competing platforms like Facebook and MySpace, top applications have attracted hundreds of thousands of users. The top application on the site, Stickerz, currently receives over 50,000 active daily users. While it’s not anywhere near the more than 1 million active daily users that top Facebook applications attract, there is still a solid enough user base to generate consistent advertising revenue.

So for those active Bebo developers, the new metrics tools (whatever they may be), will most definitely be welcomed. If we receive any updates from Bebo I’ll be sure to post screenshots of the new tools and details about them.

Update
I just spoke with Jessica Alter from Bebo who gave me an update on the Bebo developer update. There are a few things to mention. First, the competition prizes will include “valuable items from Sun Microsystems” which we can only imagine to be servers or something of that nature. In regards to the metrics available to developers, they can now have access to time spent and percentage of returning users from the developer application.

The purpose of the new metrics is to reward developers that are building engaging applications. Those that succeed at building engaging applications will be rewarded with the ability to send newsfeed items to non-app users. There will be more incentives announced in the future. So far 60 applications have been submitted to the contest and January 6 will be the last day for submissions. The main purpose of this contest is to underscore Bebo’s commitment to engagement.

Hopefully that clears some things up!

Bebo will be launching yet another new original program tomorrow about first year university students in the United Kingdom. They are going all over the country to see what these students do with their lives. Based on the trailer below it sounds like they drink, party and have sex and not much else. It also doesn’t appear that this show has much of a production budget.

The show’s host is Tom Thurlow who according to Wikipedia is “a British Schoolboy Entrepreneur, best known for epi-culture, a children’s book company which specialises in signed first editions.” Apparently he’s a popular guy but I’m not so sure about his acting career. I’m guessing that Tom will find other individuals that are actually doing work but based on the trailer I’m not so sure about that.

Bebo has been focusing on original content creation and this is a continuation of that effort. While there has never been follow-up statistics on what sort of results the original programs have produced, we assume that Bebo wouldn’t continue to produce the original programs if they weren’t successful. Given that social networks are one of the primary sources for media distribution, I’m guessing we’ll see more original programming come out of social networks.

Check out the video below for a sample of the show. While it probably isn’t targeted for your demographic, it definitely gives you a good sense of what’s going to be discussed.
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This weekend Bebo has released a chat feature for their site. The new feature resembles Facebook’s chat in that there is a chat display at the bottom of every page on the site. You can view a list which displays current friends that are online and then there is also separate windows for each instant message. The more messages you open, the more prompts that show up (as displayed in the image below).

Chat is rapidly becoming a standard feature across social platforms. I’ve been discussing chat an increasing amount as Meebo and Userplane continue to expand their offerings and social platforms continue to roll out new chat features. It’s great to see Bebo releasing their own version of chat as well. Chat naturally integrates into social networks so it’s not surprising to see Bebo release this.

I would guess that we’ll see other social networks currently without chat features begin to roll out a service over the coming months. Most social networks appear to be following Facebook’s lead when it comes to rolling out new features as they are now the largest social network worldwide. It will be interesting to see what creative twists we see on newly released chat platforms.

Thanks to Harel Shattenstein for the heads up!

Yesterday afternoon both Bebo and MySpace announced updates and made clarifications surrounding their terms of service for developers. MySpace wanted to give developers an overview of what really amounts to a three strikes and your out policy. Applications will be temporarily suspended after 48 hours following a violation warning for the first time and the punishments increase incrementally from then on.

Rather than state the punishments for violations, Bebo instead opted to give developers until September 4th to update their applications to be in compliance with Bebo’s Platform Policies and Guidelines for Developers. Bebo has also listed possible actions they will take. For more details check out the Bebo application guidelines page. It’s clear that both platforms are having challenges with terms of service violations.

Is Reactive Protection Sufficient?

One thing that has become increasingly clear to me is that on the web, policy changes are typically much more reactive than proactive. This tends to reflect a similar process that takes place within our own political system. The question that I’ve begun to wonder is: does this really protect the users? If your data is available or there are flaws in the system which increase the likelihood of abuse, who’s responsible?

Ultimately we are in a nascent industry and as such it is the job of all parties to work together to develop the best practices. Unfortunately it is frequently user privacy which is at stake. Should users be more protected? Not necessarily given that it is ultimately their own decision to take actions which put their own privacy at risk. The only concern I have is that users don’t realize the implications of the digital decisions they make.

Does Anybody Else Care?

There’s definitely increasing digital privacy advocacy taking place on Capital Hill and I’m guessing that this will only continue. As Congress becomes more aware of what is taking place online they will begin deeper investigations which ultimately should result in a digital privacy bill of rights. Joseph Smarr has already outlined a basic level of these rights.

Unfortunately none of the participants that discussed the creation of this bill of rights are based in D.C. While I seem to be continuously covering the privacy situation for users, it doesn’t appear that the users really care or are aware to what’s taking place. I’m not sure if that’s good or not but the real question is who are the representatives that are going to speak for user privacy rights when the discussion heats up on the hill?

Does anybody really care about user privacy or have we given up?

This afternoon Bebo announced a new hire, Kelly Bratt as Head of Original Productions. According to the release, “Kelly previously worked on Bebo’s award-winning online series, KateModern, which achieved more than 67 million views nd two BAFTA nominations.” KateModern was at the time known as Lonelygirl15, one of the most popular YouTube series. This new hire emphasizes the company’s focus on original programming and highlights Bebo’s existence as a media company as I wrote yesterday.

Yesterday Bebo announced yet another new program which is a strategy most other social networks are not yet entertaining. Can traditional media strategies work in a new media environment? Bebo seems to think so and I can’t blame them. When nothing else is working in the way of monetization, start using techniques that have worked before.

While Bebo may not have the reach that Facebook does, it’s clear that they have decided to shift their strategy to generating quality content and more revenue. This contrasts Facebook’s strategy which is build a top tier platform which continues to attract users. Facebook’s strategy makes a lot of sense as well though. How valuable is your content if the users decide to stop viewing it 6 months from now?

That’s only one type of question that Bebo needs to answer. It’s clear that there is a balance between technology and advertising among the top tier social platforms and each company has their own strategy. Bebo is going the media route and honestly, while they aren’t the biggest social network, their strategy appears to make a lot of sense. We’ll have to see if the company can continue to attract successful shows.