Bebo - for those who want to be spammed and enjoy irritation (bebo.com)

Member Name: k-bizzle

Product:	bebo.com
Date:	16/08/09 (36 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Find your friends.

Disadvantages: Get spammed, poor privacy, tacky backgrounds, farce groups and people, failure to delete accounts!

Bebo is a social networking site - a site which aims to connect you with your friends, allowing you to interact with them online.

Out of all the social networking sites, Bebo was the one I first signed up to as I knew a lot of people on it. Joining the site was simple enough, and didn't take long. But, after I had joined I was never impressed with Bebo!

Bebo is different to Facebook (now, a more popular social networking site) as it allows people to really personalise their profiles, by customising their backgrounds. This, initially, sounded a good idea. However, it means a lot of peoples profiles take ages to load, and some you can't even read the text on because of the colours of the text and background being so similar, which is very irritating. Also, a lot of the backgrounds just make Bebo seem tacky.

Bebo is mostly aimed at young teenagers, as the idea of customising the backgrounds would appeal to them the most.

On Bebo, it is reasonably easy to find your friends, communicate with them, share your thoughts and photos and just generally tell people about yourself (all fundamental aspects of a social networking site). However, once I had joined Facebook, I realised that Bebo was missing some very simple things, for example something similar to Facebook's "wall to wall" (where you can view the whole conversation between somebody/yourself and another person, instead of just one side of it at a time) would make communicating on Bebo a whole lot easier.

Also, the privacy on Bebo seems to be flawed somewhat. If I search for myself on Google, one of the first results I find happens to be my Bebo profile, even though I have set it to private. My Facebook profile, however, doesn't appear.

Bebo seems to be full of fake profiles. These are quite disturbing as they try to add everyone, usually claim to like to get naked on web cam or something similar, and if you are naive enough to accept them they then spam you with "come and watch my cam" messages. There probably are some on Facebook too, but I have never experienced this.

Bebo sends out far too many emails. Facebook may send me one or two a day (if someone has added me as a friend, or written on "my wall") but Bebo sends me at least 5 or 6 a day. Almost every email is about a "group" adding me, usually claiming to give you "free GHD straighteners" if you join. These are obviously fake and very annoying.

Due to all of Bebo's flaws and irritating tendencies, I rarely went on there. So, I decided to close my account. Problems solved...or so I thought. Even though they assure you that you will no longer receive any more emails from them, I'm still receiving "free GHD straighteners wants you to become a member" emails. Strange, seeing as I don't even have an account with them.

To summarise, I would say Bebo is sub-standard compared to other social networking sites, mainly Facebook. Let's face it; any site that fails to stop spamming you when you delete your account isn't worthwhile!

Summary: Join Facebook instead.