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.