AOL's Bebo becomes more of a SocialThing

By consolidating some of its acquired technologies, AOL now hopes that folding together functionality from two of its recent acquisitions will ease the pain.

AOL bought Bebo back in March 2008 for $850 million. The service, which is similar to Facebook or MySpace, skews young and is most popular in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. In August, AOL picked up SocialThing, which is a "lifestreaming" service -- that is, it aggregates status updates and other information posted by friends on multiple social networks. FriendFeed is a lifestreaming application, and the Flock browser has lifestreaming functionality as well.

For now, Bebo will be able to pull in your friend lists from Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and Delicious. (That list alone hints that AOL's still seeking a younger demographic with the Bebo/SocialThing mashup; grownups do feel some days as if LinkedIn's an island in the middle of a largish and becalmed sea.)

AOL also hopes to break down a significant wall between its older and newer properties, integrating its AIM client with Bebo. In other words, if you have an AOL Instant Messenger account already, you can use that name and password to sign into Bebo. However, we tried that Monday morning and were unable to sign in, with no indication of what wasn't working or when it would be fixed. (The attempt also knocked us off AOL itself, to our vast annoyance.)