Bebo was Ireland's first foray into the world of social networking on a truly global scale. The announcement by AOL that it's decided to cut its losses comes as no surprise though. The site has been haemorrhaging users in the last few years and never really secured a proper hold in the UK market.

Bebo will probably come to be seen as a development stage of social networking sites. One of the main reasons for its demise was probably the fact that it was not as instant as its main rival facebook. Disseminating news was laborious in that if you wanted to let you friends know something you either had to leave them a message on their page or message all friends. The latter option was usually seen as an annoyance to the receiver and is akin to the group messages recevied by most users on facebook now.

Bebo's framework was one of the first tries at social networking and facilitated that very well. Where Bebo failed was it did not see news dissemination becoming an important part social networking and even when it arrived Bebo failed to change accordingly.