This is Bebo’s first step towards a much more real-time, interactive platform since they sold to AOL for $850 million in 2008. Right after that AOL let the platform languish, eventually shutting it down for tax purposes and selling it for about $10m to Criterion Capital Partners. True story.

The new team of 20 or so employees has – surprise surprise – made the site profitable and it’s now coming back in user numbers. Mike Arrington’s recent interview with CTO Akash Garg suggested they’d be going for “Self expression, mobile and video will be strong components.” Clearly IM and Meebo is part of that.

Bebo is like a bad case of herpes – it just keeps coming back. They sold to AOL for $850 million in 2008. Then AOL, under new management, sort of just shut it down for tax purposes, selling it for next to nothing to Criterion Capital Partners. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong called the whole thing a huge distraction.

But if you think you’ve seen the last of Bebo, you’re wrong. A whole new team is in place, and with just 20 or so employees the site is profitable and growing with 6 millionish active users. So what next?

That’s exactly what I asked CTO Akash Garg today at Google Zeitgeist in Phoenix, Arizona. The interview is below.

How will Bebo carve out a place for itself in a Facebook world? Tagged seems to have done it by focusing on dating. Garg says the team is currently deciding what’s next. “Self expression, mobile and video will be strong components,” he says. But beyond that he won’t elaborate.

And when I asked if Bebo cofounder Michael Birch is involved with Bebo today, the answer was clear: “Michael Birch is not involved in any official way right now.” Is he involved unofficially? Watch below to find out.

To remind you: AOL paid $850 million for Bebo back in 2008. Ouch indeed.

In a press release that just went out, Criterion acknowledges that it has acquired the Bebo business from AOL and that it will “assume the rights and complete operating control over the global social platform business”.

The acquisition and financing was led by CCP partner Adam Levin in partnership with business strategist Paul Abramowitz and web entrepreneur Richard Hecker.

Criterion Capital Partners will take over Bebo’s global operations immediately and retain its San Francisco-based headquarters.

Exact terms of the deal are not being disclosed by either party, but AOL CEO Tim Armstrong sent a note to all employees this morning that suggests our earlier reports that the ability to offset almost the whole sum it paid for Bebo as a tax loss played a big role are correct.

A couple of paragraphs from said note (emphasis ours):

In April we communicated the fact that Bebo was among the assets we
would be not be keeping as part of our main portfolio of businesses.
At that time, we indicated that we hoped to finish our strategic
evaluation by the end of May, which we did. Today we are announcing
that we completed the sale of substantially all of the assets of Bebo,
Inc. to Criterion Capital Partners, LLC.

This sale is important for Bebo’s users and for AOL. The deal will
allow Bebo’s users to remain within the social platform that they know
and love, while enabling a new owner to bring new possibilities and
experiences to bear. Criterion Capital Partners are specialists in
facilitating growth plans and turnarounds and are well placed to drive
Bebo’s effort to strengthen its foothold within the highly competitive
social networking arena.

For AOL, the transaction will also create a meaningful tax deduction,
which should allow us to more effectively manage our tax strategy.

That’s just a bit less than the $850 million AOL paid for the social network in 2008. And as decimated as Bebo is, it’s almost certainly worth more than $10 million.

But the deal will also give AOL the ability to write off the full purchase price of Bebo for tax purposes, which we wrote about in March:

Despite that value, Aol’s best financial option for Bebo will likely be to abandon it rather than sell it, say corporate tax experts we’ve spoken with.

Here’s why – complicated corporate tax rules will let Aol write off the full purchase price of Bebo if they declare it worthless and abandon the asset. With Aol’s effective tax rate of around 45%, that’s $380 million and change in their pocket in taxes that they’d be able to avoid.

A sale of Bebo would almost certainly be less attractive. If someone were to pay them $100 million for the service, which is optimistic, Aol could still offset the remaining $750 million as a tax loss. But it could only apply against long term capital gains, and Aol doesn’t have any to offset against. They’d have to carry that loss forward and hope for future gains to offset it against.

One corporate tax attorney we spoke with wouldn’t discuss Aol specifically, but did confirm the logic of the approach. Bryan Smith, a partner at Perkins Coie, says “Without getting into any specific facts or companies, it will often be more attractive for a U.S. corporation to simply shut down a subsidiary and claim a deduction for the worthlessness of the stock against ordinary income instead of selling the stock at a distressed price and taking a capital loss, which may only offset capital gains.”

In April AOL confirmed that they were going to sell or abandon Bebo. This sale, we’re hearing, still allows AOL to write off the purchase against ordinary income, meaning they may save hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate taxes.

We’ll update with more information as we get it.

Update: From AOL -

CRITERION CAPITAL PARTNERS ACQUIRES BEBO FROM AOL

Los Angeles, CA – June 17, 2010 – Criterion Capital Partners, LLC (CCP), a merchant banking and financial advisory firm based in the United States, announced today that it has acquired the Bebo business, the youth-centric social media network, from AOL Inc. As part of the deal, CCP will assume the rights and complete operating control over the global social platform business.

The acquisition and financing was lead by Adam Levin, managing partner at CCP, in partnership with accomplished business strategist Paul Abramowitz and web entrepreneur Richard Hecker. CCP will take over Bebo’s global operations immediately and retain a San Francisco-based headquarters. Exact terms of the deal are not being disclosed by either party.

“The young, highly active user base, revenue history, presence in countries throughout the world and solid technical infrastructure make it an attractive media platform both as a standalone entity and in the context of our broader investment objectives,” said Levin.

“Criterion Capital Partners are specialists in facilitating growth plans and turnarounds, and are well placed to drive Bebo’s effort to strengthen its foothold within the highly competitive social networking arena,” said Tim Armstrong, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, AOL.

Bebo launched in 2005 and was acquired by AOL in March 2008 for $850 million. It is a social media network that combines community, connections, self-expression and entertainment via a range of social tools, games and a growing mobile platform. Bebo has a strong user base across the globe, including in the U.S., the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Poland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, India, Pakistan and the Netherlands.

About Criterion Capital Partners, LLC
Criterion Capital Partners is an integrated advisory and consulting firm serving U.S. and international clients who seek the preparation and implementation of APOs, outsourced business development, acquisitions or marketing strategies – executed concurrently with the organization and structuring of capital procurement. Led by Adam Levin, CCP delivers objective thinking, proven practices and best-of-breed partners to help clients achieve their specific development and financial goals.

Straight from the horse’s mouth: AOL CEO Tim Armstrong just told the TechCrunch Disrupt audience what most industry watchers already knew: the company made a strategic mistake in acquiring social network Bebo, and it ended up being a “major distraction” for them.

Armstrong admitted that it would have been very hard to make Bebo work right out the gate no matter what, and that probably the deal shouldn’t have gone through in the first place, given technology and other issues.

About the only good thing that came out of it, Armstrong acknowledged, was Lifestream.

Michael Arrington asked Armstrong in an on-stage interview whether AOL is still in the process of shutting down or actively trying to sell Bebo, but the only response he got was that the company is still in the middle of the whole ordeal, with no further comment.

My educated guess is that we’ll find out what Bebo’s future will look like soon enough.

How do you handle that awkwardness? Send out a mass email to all open media partners to explain the situation:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: [Bebo]
Date: Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 1:22 PM
Subject: Important News From Bebo

Dear Open Media Partners,

First, I’d like to thank you for your support of Bebo.

The end of last year brought with it many changes to our business, both difficult and exciting, including the successful spin-out of our parent company AOL and a new strategic direction. Set out in May 2009 this strategy leverages AOL’s core strengths and scale in quality content, premium advertising and consumer applications, positioning it for the next phase of growth of the Internet.

We also made a commitment to keep the lines of communication open as we worked to arrive at a strategic resolution for Bebo and today I’m reaching out to let you know that in an annual filing for Bebo made this week, AOL indicated that it is currently evaluating strategic alternatives with respect to the Bebo business, which could include a sale or shutdown of Bebo in 2010.

Social networking remains a space with heavy competition, where scale defines success, and unfortunately AOL is not in a position to further fund and support Bebo in pursuing a turnaround in social networking.

The decision to move forward at this point on Bebo was not made lightly and AOL is committed to working quickly to determine if there are any interested parties for Bebo. The company’s current expectation is to complete our strategic evaluation by the end of May 2010 and we hope that by sharing what we can, when we can, it helps to relieve any uncertainty about what’s ahead.

In the interim I wanted to assure you of our continued commitment to your organization and we will come back to you as soon as we are able to move forward.

AOL has long regretted its $850 million purchase of social network Bebo, and ever since CEO Tim Armstrong came on board it’s pretty much been left to die on the vine. AOL is preparing a filing in the UK to alert regulators there of its plans to either sell or shut down the site. While a sale seems like the logical way to go, Bebo is pretty much worthless now and for tax reasons it might make more sense to simply shut it down.

In an email sent out to employees today, AOL explained:

As we evaluate our portfolio of brands against our strategy, it is clear that social networking is a space with heavy competition, and where scale defines success. Bebo, unfortunately, is a business that has been declining and, as a result, would require significant investment in order to compete in the competitive social networking space. AOL is not in a position at this time to further fund and support Bebo in pursuing a turnaround in social networking.

AOL has been thinking of selling Bebo for more than a year, and already wrote down much of the acquisition. So it already swallowed the loss. The only question now is what is the most efficient way to dispose of it.

Photo credit: Flickr/Hoggarazzi

Newly independent Aol is still struggling with the fate of Bebo, the social network they acquired for $850 million in 2008.

No one argues that Aol underpaid for Bebo. And the social network has fallen from 22 million monthly unique visitors when it was acquired to just 14.6 million today (Comscore worldwide). But even so, Bebo clearly has some value on the open market.

Despite that value, Aol’s best financial option for Bebo will likely be to abandon it rather than sell it, say corporate tax experts we’ve spoken with.

Here’s why – complicated corporate tax rules will let Aol write off the full purchase price of Bebo if they declare it worthless and abandon the asset. With Aol’s effective tax rate of around 45%, that’s $380 million and change in their pocket in taxes that they’d be able to avoid.

A sale of Bebo would almost certainly be less attractive. If someone were to pay them $100 million for the service, which is optimistic, Aol could still offset the remaining $750 million as a tax loss. But it could only apply against long term capital gains, and Aol doesn’t have any to offset against. They’d have to carry that loss forward and hope for future gains to offset it against.

One corporate tax attorney we spoke with wouldn’t discuss Aol specifically, but did confirm the logic of the approach. Bryan Smith, a partner at Perkins Coie, says “Without getting into any specific facts or companies, it will often be more attractive for a U.S. corporation to simply shut down a subsidiary and claim a deduction for the worthlessness of the stock against ordinary income instead of selling the stock at a distressed price and taking a capital loss, which may only offset capital gains.”

If Aol were to abandon Bebo they couldn’t pull any of the assets of the company back into Aol, say the experts we’ve spoken with. Otherwise it becomes a non-taxable liquidation. If Aol had debt or preferred stock on the books with Bebo, though, they could pull out assets to offset that liability.

If the title sounds a bit odd, it’s because Foursquare is avoiding having executive-sounding positions, Crowley says. But Cohen’s role will be vital for the startup as he’ll be basically stepping in for much of what takes up Crowley’s time now: big deals, hiring, outgrowing our space, finances, and legal issues. “Everything that takes me away from product,” Crowley notes. In other words, basically he’ll be the COO of the young startup.

Cohen joins Foursquare at a time when the location-based atmosphere is red hot. Not only are Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt pushing the check-in game, but Yelp, with its 1.25 million iPhone users just got into the game as well. Crowley noted earlier today that it was one year ago when he and co-founder Naveen Selvadurai decided to take Foursquare seriously as a new business.

“Our growth curve no longer looks like a hockey stick. It looks like a skateboard ramp with 4 feet of vert. Bananatown,” Foursquare tweeted from its main Twitter account earlier today.

Cohen left Bebo sometime after it was acquired by AOL in 2008. He was currently in between jobs, but him and Crowley go way back to Crowley’s first job at Jupiter Research. Cohen brings the total number of Foursquare employees up to eight. Expect that number to keep blossoming with the Cohen hire.

I don’t have comparable data to back it up, but anecdotally it seems the Web 2.0 generation is doing a better job at giving. Or at least Bebo founder Michael Birch is.

Birch has spent the last six months working with a team of two other people to build a social giving site for the popular organization, Charity:Water. It launched its beta site today, and with just a Tweet announcing it nearly 400 members have already raised some $3,000.

Charity:Water’s accountability and simplicity of purpose has made it a popular charity in New York, Hollywood and increasingly the Valley.  Here’s the value proposition: One-out-of-six-people on the planet doesn’t have access to clean drinking water. $5,000 buys an African village a well. Every dime you donate, goes to these wells. You can even watch the wells being tapped for the first time via Web video. The non-profit is turning three in a few weeks, and it’s raised more than $10 million over that time—much of it in $20 increments from a base of some 60,000 donors. It was Obama-fundraising-math before that was invented. As a result some 700,000 people in the world now have access to clean drinking water.

It was all started three years ago when Scott Harrison, reformed bad boy and Charity:Water founder, asked people to come to a huge New York party for his September birthday and donate $20 at the door instead of giving him a gift. He raised $15,000 and built six wells in Uganda. (They were cheaper than the wells Charity:Water usually builds because three were shallow wells and three were rehabs of existing wells.) Like any great accidental entrepreneur, Harrison knew he was on to something.

In addition to all kinds of creative fund raising, detailed in the video below, the following year, Harrison opened his birthday to everyone via the Web, asking them to donate $32 dollars, since it was his 32 birthday. That year, he raised $59,000 and other September birthday babies brought the total to $150,000, which went to wells in Kenya. Not bad, but they had to HTML hand-code each participant’s site. Pretty laborious work for a small non-profit.

The next year he got more September babies to “give up” their birthdays, and a company called InspEnv.com built them a site, but it wasn’t hugely social or scalable. Still 800 people “gave up” their birthdays and raised some $965,000 dollars to bring some 50,000 people clean water in Ethiopia.

But Harrison knew that the value of a lot of micro-giving campaigns like Kiva and the popular Facebook application, Causes, is rooted in the ability to make small donations super-easy to solicit and to make via existing online social graphs. He was trying to figure out sites that knew when a huge number of people’s birthdays were and after MySpace and Facebook, he came across Bebo. Early last year, he cold-emailed Bebo founder Michael Birch to ask if he’d be willing to send a note out to his September born users and Birch wrote back that it was “a bad time.” It was actually a great time for Birch—he was selling the company to AOL for $850 million.

Once the deal was done, Birch called Harrison and suggested he build him a site that could help people born in any month instantly “give up their birthdays” for Charity:Water’s mission. It was fitting since Birch’s next project was his pre-Bebo project, a site called Birthday Alarm. Nine months later, Harrison is about to turn 34, Charity:Water is turning three, and Birch has finished the site. For a free project, it’s a pretty nice looking site.

The recession makes this perfect timing. If you’re panicked about money and job loss, giving up your birthday is an easy way to give to those less-fortunate without having to spend a dime yourself. My husband has a September birthday and has already signed up. I plan to sign up for my birthday in December. You can create your own campaign in a matter of moments and with a few clicks, share it via all your existing social networks.

I’m sure the coders who were up until 4 a.m. last night will have mixed feelings about this, but this is one time I really want to see TechCrunch users break a beta site.

[Photo credit: Scott Harrison]

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6202666&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00adef&fullscreen=1

The story of charity: water – The 2009 September Campaign Trailer from charity: water on Vimeo.

Translation – AOL is looking to spin Bebo off into an independent company, and they’ll retain an equity interest via AOL Ventures.

This is pretty much in line with what he told Erick during an interview last week. During that interview he distanced himself from the acquisition: “I was not here during the acquisition of Bebo. Social networking was an unclaimed category, and growing quickly.” The reason he placed it in AOL Ventures is so that it can “focus on improving the consumer product,” he said. Armstrong added that one of the purposes of AOL Ventures is “to keep things on track that have not been on track. “

But he noted that there is another purpose for AOL Ventures as well. In areas where product synergies “have not been realized, it gives us an opportunity to take it out of AOL, to make it groomed, and maybe attract outside investment.” It was pretty clear he was talking about Bebo.

AOL acquired Bebo in early 2008 for $850 million. But the property has languished since then and it has not been integrated much at all into AOL proper. Bebo had 8.7 million unique visitors in the U.S. in June, 2009, 20 percent down from its peak in March, 2009 (comScore). Globally, it is holding up better, with 24.2 million uniques in May, 2009 down 12 percent since March, 2009. But if Facebook is worth $6 billion to $10 billion, Bebo might still be able to get a decent valuation if it can hold onto its users.

Last week, Facebook took a $200 million investment that valued the company at $10 billion. So if Facebook is worth $10 billion, how much is Twitter worth? After all, Twitter turned down $500 million from Facebook late last year, and founder Evan Williams might not even sell it for $1 billion. But how about for $1.7 billion?

That is the valuation we come up with when we run Twitter’s numbers through our new social network valuation model. The model takes into account the size of each social network’s audience in different countries and the average online spending per capita in those countries. Using Facebook’s $10 billion valuation as a baseline, Twitter would be the fourth most valuable social network after MySpace ($6.5 billion) and Bebo ($1.8 billion).

Of course, that $10 billion valuation was for preferred shares, so $1.7 billion might be a valuation a strategic investor or acquirer would be willing to place on Twitter. If you use the $4 billion to $6 billion range Facebook’s common stock is being valued at in private sales, then Twitter’s valuation would come down to $671 million to $1 billion. And if you use Bebo’s 2008 valuation of $850 million as a benchmark instead, Twitter would be worth $781 million.

So there is your range: roughly $700 million to $1.7 billion. And remember, Twitter may still have scaling issues, but it doesn’t have all the costs that Facebook has in terms of storage and other capital expenditures. For one thing,Twitter isn’t keeping everyone’s photos on its servers—that is what TwitPic and Yfrog are for. On the flip side, there is also the question of revenues, which remains an open question for Twitter (and for Facebook, for that matter). Is Twitter going to make money from real-time search, corporate accounts, or maybe even figuring out a way to sell followers? Given how engaged a large portion of Twitter’s users are already and how it is becoming a hot testbed for opt-in marketing, it is not inconceivable that Twitter’s users will be worth more to advertisers than Facebook’s. But before we can find out, Twitter needs to pick a business model.

We’ve now remodeled social network valuations based on current user numbers and Facebook’s most recent $10 billion valuation. The results are dramatically different.

Based on the original year-old model, if Facebook was worth $15 billion (their then-current valuation), MySpace, with far more U.S. users, was worth nearly $20 billion:

Our model takes Comscore data for available countries and regions. We’ve graphed each of 26 well known social networks with the data we have been able to collect. We’ve then calculated the average advertising spend (estimated by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in a recent report) for each person online in each of those countries. For example, in the U.S., the total 2008 estimated Internet advertising spend is $25.2 billion. We’ve divided that by the number of people online in the U.S. according to Comscore (191 million), to get an average Internet spend per person of $132. View the raw data and calculations here.

The U.S., by the way, is only the 4th most valuable market per Internet user, trailing The UK ($213), Australia ($148) and Denmark ($144).

We’ve then multiplied the average Internet spend per user in each market with the number of unique users each social network has in that market, essentially creating a “weighted average” based on the advertising dollars chasing users. If a social network has more users in the U.S., Japan, the UK, Germany, Australia, and other bigger advertising networks, they will have a higher weighted average valuation.

We believe this model is an effective way to rank various competing social networks. It bumps down networks like Orkut and Friendster who have tens of millions of users in markets with very little advertising spend, and bumps up networks with lots of users in higher value markets.

Based on this model, MySpace is by far the most valuable social network. Second place Facebook has just 75% of the value of MySpace (even though it now has more users), followed by Bebo (26% of MySpace value), Hi5 and Amebio. LinkedIn comes in at no. 11, at 6% of MySpace’s value.

The new model takes into account the dramatic rise of Facebook usage over the last year, the massive recent decline in MySpace usage, and less dramatic changes in the other social networks. We’ve also modeled out the various valuations with the old Bebo ($850 million) and LinkedIn ($1 billion) valuations as pivot points. We’ve also added Twitter to the list just for kicks.

The bottom line: If Facebook is worth $10 billion today, MySpace is worth just $6.5 billion. Bebo is worth $1.8 billion, Twitter is worth $1.7 billion and LinkedIn is worth $0.8 billion. Facebook also accounts for 37% of all social networking value points in our model. Another way of saying this: If Facebook is worth $10 billion, the value of the entire social networking industry is $27.1 billion.

Lots of charts and graphs below. The full model is here if you want to look at all the data (I recommend zooming unless you have super vision). Thanks to TechCrunch intern Dan Romero for running the new model.

Before, Bebo was only available in English and for some reason also Polish, but now it will use IP-based geo-targetting to cater services in users’ mother tongues. It launched a latino site for U.S.-based users just last week.

Successfully rolling out social services across Europe is never an easy feat to accomplish, and Netlog and Facebook have a pretty strong foothold here, as does MySpace, although the latter appears to be struggling with their expansion strategy lately. Bebo is doing it the smart way – which is of course no guarantee for success – by teaming up with local media partners. Bebo is partnering with AlloCiné, RTL’s Clipfish, Telecom Italia owned Yalp!, Diagonal View and Preview Networks’ Filmtrailer, which will all be incorporated in Bebo’s Open Media platform. Bebo is planning to let these and additional media partners put a button on their websites that lets users share content on their profiles via status updates.

That’s the right strategy in my opinion, but they will find that competing against both the big boys who’re already present throughout Europe as well as the local players who’ve been around – in many cases – since the turn of the century, will be a long, hard battle. Those who have been following the developments in social networking services here in Europe, as well as the rough decline of online advertising budgets in general, would tell them the same.

We’ve reported in the past that AOL might be contemplating a sale of Bebo, but the press release makes it sound like they’re in fact heavily relying on Bebo for their social strategy instead:

Bebo forms the centrepiece of the AOL People Networks business unit. People Networks’ collection of community platforms help improve people’s lives by connecting them with everyone and everything they care about. People Networks does this through a web-based experience on Bebo.com, through desktop clients and mobile devices. At the heart of People Networks is the Lifestream, a real-time, platform for aggregating and distributing social feeds across mediums.

It will be interesting to look back in a couple of years and see if Bebo made the right decision at the right time, but I have my doubts about their capacity to effectively compete in Europe starting this late in the game.

Social timelines are going mainstream (see AOL/Bebo), but startups are pushing them to the next level. Today, Lifeblob, the Indian startup working on ways for you to visualize your life on the net, is introducing a refreshed version of its social timeline creation tool. With it, you can easily patch together a visual representation of your life’s most memorable moments by timestamping certain events and enriching them with photos, text and videos. The end result can easily be shared on a variety of social services, or embedded into any blog or web page (example below).

It’s an invite-only service for now, but we have an unlimited amount of invite codes for you. It’s simply techcrunch and you can use it to sign up here.

Lifeblob is one of the investments of SeedFund, the Google-backed VC fund who actively looks for early-stage financing deals within the Indian startup community. The company raised its first round of financing of approximately $1 million from the fund in August 2008. It employs only 4 people for now and its business model is centered around advertising – which it will start rolling out after its general launch – and premium services (like branded timelines, etc.)

Public timelines on Lifeblob can be searched by other people with ease. If they’re not protected, anyone is able to both view and share the “lifeblobs” with the rest of the world (thanks to an integration with SocialTwist’s Tell-a-Friend service). Privacy settings allow your updates to be private or publicly visible, or for your friends only. You can also opt not to be listed in the Lifeblob directory at all, while still getting a shareable dedicated URL for your timeline (here’s an example for Michael Arrington).

Lifeblob isn’t so much about the concept of lifestreaming as it is about being able to visualize moments in a person’s life, while showing relations to other people whose moments intersect with theirs. Those intersections can take the form of people, places, events, associated tags, and so on. Each intersection shows up as a stacked tile, which launches the associated timeline when clicked on. For example, if Mike Arrington met up with Gary Vaynerchuk, Loren Feldman, and David Recordon after a conference (here’s the photographic evidence that this did indeed happen) and all of them would have indicated this in their timelines or been tagged, you’d get a timeline that shows that connection inside the interface and lets you explore more relations and other people’s lifeblobs simply by clicking around a bit.

http://www.lifeblob.com/topic/mike_arrington/view/stack/embed#at=2009-03-06T15:35:59Z

It also works as a marketing vehicle. For instance, here is a timeline of all of Woody Allen’s movies, with connections to timelines for actors who have appeared in his movies. The UI is nice, but if you click any of the frames in the embed above with a screen resolution lower than 1024×768, you’ll immediately notice it still needs quite a bit of fine-tuning, as you can’t resize it properly and the menu items are all over the place. That said, it’s a pretty cool service reminiscent of tools like Dipity and Kronomy but with a more social approach. Definitely a tool I’d consider using to recap events, which I think it is most suited for. Turning your whole life into a lifeblob seems like a whole lot of work, unless you could auto-update from other services (right now, only Picasa is supported).

Here’s a screencast on how it works:

http://www.viddler.com/player/f015aadc/

In the first of several major product changes that will sweep through AOL in the coming months, the company is adding more lifestreaming capabilities to its Bebo social network today, including activity stream updates from rival social networks Facebook and MySpace. It is also introducing a visual timeline called a “Lifestory” that puts uploaded photos, events, and (soon) videos into a scrollable, chronological series of postage stamp icons at the top of members’ profile pages. Eventually, people will be able to subscribe to other Lifestories, including those from brands and bands, and embed them in their own profile pages or elsewhere. The timeline will also become the centerpiece of a Bebo iPhone app coming out soon.

The new features should all help to reinvigorate a site that has been in the doldrums lately. But Bebo’s biggest boost will come later this week when AOL migrates all of its AIM Profiles members over to Bebo on Wednesday and Thursday. This single move will more than double Bebo’s presence in the U.S., where AIM Profiles is even bigger than Bebo. According to comScore, Bebo’s unique U.S. visitors have been in decline the past few months to 5 million in January, whereas AIM Profiles has seen an upswing to 8.5 million. (See chart below). Worldwide, Bebo has 22.6 million monthly visitors.

At the center of AOL’s new product strategy is its “Lifestream Platform.” Think of it as FriendFeed for the masses, with personal AIM updates mixed in. Already, Bebo members are able to keep up with their friends’ activities on other sites, such as Flickr, Twitter and Delicious. Now Facebook, MySpace and YouTube are being supported as well. Whenever any of your friends do something on these services, their activity stream shows up on your Bebo page. Once you link an account to Bebo, it automatically keeps track of all of your new friends on that service as well. (The technology is based on AOL’s acquisition of Socialthing! last summer).

If you are an AIM member, all of your AIM buddies now seamlessly appear on Bebo. And through Bebo’s recently launched Social Inbox, you can get all of your lifestream updates, instant messages, and email in one massive feed.

But is this a capitulation to the two big social networks out there? No, says David Liu, the senior vice president and general manager of AOL’s People Networks:

We are not trying to connect everybody to everybody—that is Facebook—just to the content and people important to them.

Bebo is just the beginning. He plans on rolling out the Lifestream platform across revamped versions of AOL’s IM clients (AIM and ICQ), mobile apps, and even other Websites later this year. Regardless of any second thoughts that AOL may have had after buying Bebo, it is a central part of its strategy today. AOL has a huge and active group of millions of IM users that it has been wanting to turn into a social network for years. Now it has a place for them to create profiles and interact, but more importantly it can take the central communication model of social networks—the lifestream—and pour it back into its IM clients.

It is an ambitious undertaking. But will AOL’s take on lifestreaming be compelling enough to keep existing members from leaving? And more importantly, will it be compelling enough to attract new members from eleswhere on the Web?

At the beginning of last December, Ning reversed course on its anything-legal-goes policy by declaring a prohibition on adult social networks. The reason? Porn wasn’t paying the bills; instead of attracting advertisers, it was scaring them away. Legal adult content was also begetting illegal content, which drew the ire of both authorities and lawyers with DMCA notices in hand.

Given the report released by CPM Advisors at the beginning of 2008, which suggested that Ning relied on adult content for much of its traffic, one might expect Ning to take a hit after shooing the smut out the door. But according to comScore traffic from January, that hasn’t been the case at all.

Ning gave adult networks until January 5th to pack up their bags and leave. That gives us the rest of the month to see how the network of networks fared without them. And it actually fared quite well, picking up almost 1 million unique visitors in the United States (from 3.94 million in December to 4.79 million in January). That pickup is almost enough to pass Bebo, which attracted 4.97 million Americans in January and barely managed to halt a downslide that surely didn’t make AOL happy.

What’s not clear is whether there’s been much dispute over what constitutes adult content. As far as we can tell – and as CEO Gina Bianchini outlined prior to the evictions – Ning hasn’t prohibited nudity entirely. Nudist social networks are still listed in its directory, for example, although all of them appear to be private networks. If you’ve run a Ning network with borderline content that has been either kicked out or allowed to stay, please let us know in the comments.