The New Bebo: AOL's Integrated Social Powerplay?

Last month Bebo delivered a major redesign that integrates a lot of AOL's enduring popular features and begins to offer the short of multiplatform ecosystem that may alter the social realm in AOL's direction.

As Mashable reported about a month ago, Bebo's new features include:

IM/AIM integration: Log in or keep track of your friends right from BEBO
Social: Integration of AOL's recently required SocialThing, a service similar to FriendFeed. This enables you to feature content from other social presences on your pages, even track nonBebo friends.
Email: Get notifications of new messages in AOL mail, Yahoo Mail, GMail, and (soon) Outlook.
Access to TW Audio/Video: Bebo now has Time Warner multimedia built right in, to significantly enhance the entertainment value of the experience.

This screenshot I took off Mashable gives you a sense of all of this integration, as well as the enduring attractiveness of Bebo.



I like Bebo as a service, though more Americans will need to be in its clutches before it could replace FaceBook for me. In addition to offering a beautiful and highly functional and entertaining environment, the service also has some amazing and pleasantly intrusive ways for marketers to reach this audience. Perhaps all this great integration will mean a boost to Bebo traffic.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Palringo: Making IM Work Better On Cellys

OK, people have been IMing from phones for some time. But really only text. And as those of us who use IM know, there are so many other ways that IM has transformed the way we share online.

A UK company called Palringo is out to make IM work a lot harder online by adding dimension to the offering for mobile devices.

Here, let them tell you what they do:

What is Palringo?
Palringo is the first Rich Messaging Service - bringing together for the first time the ability to easily exchange text, voice and picture messages with friends, family and colleagues across all popular instant messaging services, whether sitting at a computer or on the move using a mobile phone or PDA.

What does all this do? Well, it makes messaging a lot more productive for a start. There are many instances in which pictures of video or other forms of content would aid to the richness of understanding as we broach topics via IM. Being able to send and deliver these to mobile eliminates the need to get to a PC to get your work --- or play -- done.

Palringo also lets you exchange voice messages -- to one or to many. This has benefits for phone to PC as well as phone to phone interactions.

Palringo supports the following messenger services

Palringo
AIM
Yahoo
MSN/Live
Google
ICQ
Jabber
Gadu Gadu

Additionally, you can use Palringo to create and participate in Palringo groups -- a sort of one to many/many to one form of communication.

And the price is right too! Free to personal (versus enterprise) users.

Check it out on their website, or through your celly!

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.