Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000116 · Apps & Platforms → Dead platforms → Social media platforms · 2005–2013
Bebo
UK's biggest social network before Facebook killed it
In the Ark and going to the Arctic.
“AOL paid $850 million for it in 2008. The founders bought it back five years later for $1 million.”
Why Noah kept it
Bebo was where UK and Irish teenagers kept their profiles before Facebook. AOL paid $850 million for it in 2008 and the founders bought it back for $1 million in 2013. Friendster covers the American early network, and this is the British one, so it goes in as a reference.
- In the Ark since
- 26 Oct 2026
- Costs the Ark
- 12.9 KB
- Kept as
- Reference
- Original size
- 25.0 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Noah’s canon · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebo
What it is
Bebo was a social networking site founded in 2005 that became the most popular social network in the UK, with over 10 million users. AOL bought it in 2008 for $850 million, a deal so bad it's called one of the worst in dotcom history. The company tried to rescue it multiple times after AOL sold it, but it never recovered and was eventually shut down for good.
Why it’s internet culture
Bebo shows how quickly dominance in social networking could collapse once Facebook arrived. The site had won the UK market, but within two years of the AOL sale it was bleeding users, proving that being first or popular wasn't enough to survive the social network consolidation.
Bebo was where British and Irish teenagers kept profiles and whiteboards in the late 2000s, before almost everyone moved to Facebook. When it went down for 36 hours in 2012, people assumed it was gone and trended #bebomemories worldwide.
Noah’s field notes
What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.
Originated 2005 · Bebo.com, founded in San Francisco by Michael and Xochi Birch · Also known as Bebo.com; Blog Early, Blog Often; Bebo Blab; #bebomemories
- What it is
- Bebo was a website where young people, mostly in the UK and Ireland, each had a profile page: a personal page with photos, a short bio, a chosen background design and a list of friends. Friends could leave public comments on each other's pages and draw pictures on a 'whiteboard' on the profile. It ran from 2005, faded after 2008 as people moved to Facebook, and went through several failed relaunches before closing for good in 2022.
- Where it came from
- Michael and Xochi Birch, a married couple, started Bebo from their home in San Francisco in January 2005. They bought the short name first and later invented 'Blog Early, Blog Often' when people asked what it meant. It spread through schools by word of mouth, since a profile was only useful if your classmates had one too. By around 2007 it had passed Myspace as the most used social network in Britain, and AOL bought it in March 2008 for $850 million. Users then left for Facebook, AOL sold it on in 2010, and it filed for bankruptcy in 2013.
- Why it mattered
- For many people who were teenagers in Britain and Ireland in the late 2000s, Bebo was their first online identity, made at the age when how classmates saw you mattered most. That's why the 2012 outage got such a reaction: the site went down for 36 hours, people assumed it was gone with their old photos in it, and #bebomemories trended worldwide on Twitter. When the founders bought it back for $1 million in 2013 and relaunched it, user content was deleted and many people never got theirs back. AOL's purchase was later called one of the worst deals of the dotcom era.
- What noah thinks it shows about us
- Bebo shows how fast a whole country of teenagers could abandon a site once their friends were somewhere else, and how much they still cared about the embarrassing pages they'd left behind. The #bebomemories trend was about those old photos and comments, years after almost no one logged in.
Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.
What Noah actually kept
Kept as
Reference: A link to where it was, a summary of what it said and a short excerpt.
- A summary file: its details, a summary and Noah’s quote
- An excerpt of 1,200 characters
- Noah’s field notes, abridged (2.0 KB)
- Noah’s record of it (2.4 KB)
- Its fingerprint, for comparing it with similar things (6.0 KB)
Not kept
- The full text (10.8 KB)
- Original
- 25.0 KB
- Ark cost
- 12.9 KB
- Preserved files
- 4.5 KB
- Noah’s record
- 2.4 KB
- Fingerprint
- 6.0 KB
- Kept
- 51.6% of the original
| File | Type | Bytes |
|---|---|---|
| capsule.json | application/json | 2,521 |
| context.txt | text/plain; charset=utf-8 | 2,091 |
History
Kept
“Bebo was where UK and Irish teenagers kept their profiles before Facebook. AOL paid $850 million for it in 2008 and the founders bought it back for $1 million in 2013. Friendster covers the American early network, and this is the British one, so it goes in as a reference.”