If you have been paying attention to the activities among social networks over the past year, you would have noticed that Bebo is one of the few networks that realizes it’s a media company. While MySpace has announced a music service and imeem has expanded their dominance in social music, Bebo has been focusing on distributing original content. Today Bebo announced the launch of Model.Live. This new show is sponsored by Express and will air on Vogue.TV and Bebo.

The show will reveal “the truth about how professional models live.” I’m sure it will be thrilling! If you are running a social network and don’t think that you are in the media business, you are probably fooling yourself. Mark Zuckerberg is known for positioning Facebook as a technology company but as Kara Swisher said in her interview with Mark and Sheryl Sandberg, Kara kept trying to push Mark into admitting Facebook’s a media company.

As expected, Mark didn’t relent but it is clear that social networks have become an alternative to other media channels such as television. While you can argue that both television and social networks can be used in conjunction, I see them as an alternative because its rare to see a television show leverage a social network to complement itself. Users spend a significant amount of time consuming content on the sites and hence, they are media companies.

The job of social networks is to help people connect and ultimately to provide engaging content (which is typically created by the users). Nobody ever said that the content can’t be original, “high quality” content. Do you see social networks as media companies? What opportunities do you see for original content on social networks?

Jemima Kiss is reporting that “Bebo and the TV company behind Wife Swap have teamed up with one of the world’s experts in interstellar radio communication, Dr Alexander Zaitsev, to beam 500 messages from users into space in a digital time capsule.” This means up to 500 users will be able to beam their messages to a planet 20 light years from earth in hopes that their message reaches another life form.

Given that on this planet there are millions of radio waves floating around on a daily basis, even if the messages do make it 20 light years away, I’m not sure that any living creature will be able to receive it. The concept that other “intelligent life” on another planet has also discovered something called “radio waves” is mind blowing. This experiment is literally “a shot in the dark”.

The messages will be sent by Bebo users, celebrities and politicians. When asked about the content of the messages, Dr. Zaitsev said, “I understand that in the majority of cases these messages may be naïve, but I also hope that we will receive a creative and fresh look at the subject.” It sounds like an interesting concept to me but I’m not sure how effective this will ultimately be.

While blasting out interstellar messages sounds amazing, the effect of this seems relatively useless. Who exactly will be listening to see if the “intelligent life” 20 light years away beam anything back? Perhaps they will simply shoot back a rocket? For now this appears to be a successful publicity stunt which has attracted the attention of a few blogs.

Yesterday Bebo announced that they have extended their API to the web in general as well as desktop applications. What does this mean for developers? Well it now means that a lot of the functionality you previously had within your Bebo applications can be extended to the web in general. How does this compare to the much discussed Facebook Connect and already launched MySpace Data Availability?

Ultimately it sounds extremely similar to these platforms. The authentication method for web applications is also similar. When a user logs into your external Bebo application they are simply redirected to Bebo to authorize your website to have access to their information and then they are redirected back to your site.

The trend toward opening up APIs to third-parts sites so that your profile information can be leveraged around the web continues with the launch of this new feature on the Bebo platform. Next week Facebook is expected to announce their much anticipated Facebook Connect service. It will be interesting to see how developers leverage these new services.

PaidContent is reporting that the AOL acquisition of Bebo is now complete. The news also comes with reports that Yahoo! will end up losing their ad deal as AOL’s Platform A becomes integrated into a new combined entity. The combined entity includes AIM and ICQ, Bebo and other community platforms which will be called the “People Networks.”

Ultimately what just took place is that AOL’s people channel fell in popularity and they simply acquired a growing company to rebuild their community division. As Adam Ostrow points out, this could be five years too late. Why didn’t AOL turn AIM into a social network years ago? I’ve been writing about this since I started blogging over a year and a half ago. Instant messaging is still one of my primary social networks.

It’s as though AOL is spending a ton of money to try and rebuild what once used to be a booming community. This is a classic problem facing the large companies which have large attention shifts away from their properties to external sites. As large attention shifts take place, online media entities need to try to monetize while continuing to expand their attention portfolio.

We love to hate AOL though. AOL does have one of the most diversified set of assets which represent some of the most visited websites. While I’m somewhat skeptical of how a combined entity will end up working out, it makes some sense. Combine chat, social networking and user profiles, tracking of activities throughout the network and you end up with something eerily similar to Facebook. It will be interesting to see if AOL can make these distinct entities somehow work together.

One week ago AOL announced that they were acquiring Bebo for a whopping $850 million. The blogosphere was surprised by the acquisition and now one week later talk of AOL making a horrible decision is returning. Is this surprising? Not really. While Bebo was the second social platform to market, growth has become relatively stagnant.

According to Henry Blodget, executives at AOL have had some internal conflict over the acquisition. The primary issues highlighted were the inability for AOL to monetize social-network inventory, Bebo’s flattening growth and the belief that the Bebo founders will hit the road. If I was the Bebo founders I definitely would hit the road! We’ve heard stories of how expensive it was for Fox Interactive to keep on the MySpace founders on board.

I have to agree with Henry Blodget when he quotes Glengarry Glen Ross, “first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado, second prize is a set of steak knives, third prize is you’re fired.” Many believe that the social networking space is a two horse race and that’s how it will remain. While maintaining a site with millions of active users can be a steady business, you won’t see the type of growth that the leaders are experiencing.

This was a last ditch attempt at joining the social networking game and as I said last week, join the social graph race. What is confusing to me though is why doesn’t AOL simply focus on leveraging their instant messaging service? Building out instant message services that are comparable of competing services such as Trillian or even Facebook’s new IM service would help them to rebuild the failing AOL community.

Then again, I’ve been wondering about why AOL hasn’t reinvented their instant messaging service for years. Do you think AOL’s acquisition made any sense? Do you think leveraging their instant messaging service could prove valuable?

Launching a social platform can be a daunting task especially if you build it in less than a year. That’s exactly what Bebo did when it launched its platform last month. Since then thousands of developers have contributed close to 1,300 applications on the site and it has become the second largest platform (then again it’s the only other alternative platform to Facebook currently). As a result of their platform launch, the site suffered increasing downtime.

It appears that the site is on pace to surpass their downtime from the previous month after suffering more then 190 minutes of downtime this month so far. It’s well known that the launch of social platforms rapidly reduce a site’s performance. Last month reports were released that showed Facebook being the slowest social network.

At this point slow social networks appear to be a fact of life. If you can recall back to when MySpace experienced their exponential growth, the site appeared to be down for a substantial amount of time on a daily basis. Looks like Bebo is suffering from the same illness. It appears contagious so hopefully Orkut doesn’t catch the same cold when they launch their social platform.