A Love Letter to Bebo: The Best Social Media
Words by Amy Louise O’Callaghan.
When my tiny Irish village finally got broadband connection in 2009, I did two things. I watched every Fall Out Boy video on YouTube in order to feed my increasingly creepy Pete Wentz fixation, and then I made a Bebo account.
First introduced in 2005, the American social media site was a huge hit in Ireland, easily overtaking its most direct competitor MySpace, landing in that perfect sweet spot just before we’d all eventually sell our information (and sanity) to Mark Zuckerberg in 2010. Unlike the more minimalist designs of today’s social media, the site itself was an attack on the senses. There was just so much to do. You could obsessively curate your Friends list. Edit your bio. Choose the perfect landing page song. Design themes (or “Skins” in this case). Play games. Make quizzes. Leave comments or even give luv, a virtual currency which was supposed to denote one’s popularity, but was really just an excellent tactic for sly flirting.
I’d love to tell you this was the worst skin, but I’d be lying.
A particularly brutal feature that has thankfully not been replicated since was the ability to list your Top 16 Friends (cyberbullying wouldn’t receive an awareness campaign until the early 2010s, a fact made very obvious by the fact this feature should never have been granted to teenage girls). Few events in my life have measured up to the sheer horror of discovering you were moved down someone’s list, only to be eventually moved back up once the drama passed a day later.
Looking back, it feels like every feature on the site was designed to brew chaos. Your page views were logged and displayed, effectively exhibiting your popularity for the world to see. When you added someone as a friend, you could log how exactly you met them, which would once again be displayed publicly. Innocent enough, if it wasn’t for the fact some options included “we hooked up”, “we dated” and perhaps the most mortifying, “don’t know them” (did I once review the entirety of a crush’s friend list in order to check all his female friends and how he knew them? Of course. And you would too if you were a 13 year old on the internet).
Despite the mortification and obvious cyberbullying avenues, there were two things about Bebo that made it so incredibly fun for myself and everyone I knew. First of all, in comparison to Facebook, which was inundated with Farmville requests from parents and aunts, Bebo was truly a space devoid of parental supervision. Was this safe for my emotional and mental well being? Of course not, but that’s not the point. It was a space that, despite being incredibly public, felt weirdly private. It was a secret only you, your friends and the other 400 people in your Friends list knew. Secondly, your Bebo page truly felt like a customisable area in which to truly curate your own online space, a trait I’ve only ever seen on MySpace and Tumblr. Unlike the clinical black and white layouts of Facebook and co, Bebo was an onslaught of Playboy Bunnies, Blingee gifs and the quotes like “Only God Can Judge Me” and “I’m the type of girl who will burst out laughing at something that happened yesterday”. I picked up basic graphic design skills by making custom Skins and spent hours browsing YouTube for the perfect landing page song, all in order to curate a corner of the internet that screamed “ME”, or at least the “me” I wanted to present to the world.
Bebo was so prevalent in Ireland and the UK that it effectively launched it’s own subculture; the Bebo stunnah, best characterised as a girl aged teen to early twenties who “tawks lik dis <3” and changes her username to something along the lines of “xXxSeXyTing1996xXx”. To be both admired and feared, I miss them, they were better than us all.
It also completely affected how emoticons (showing my age) were used at the time, with iconic Bebo-only emoticons like “:L” and “:/” transgressing social media completely, being used everywhere from YouTube comments to text messages. The quickest way to strike fear into someone’s heart was to end a text with “:/”, the “slanty face”, carrier of passive aggression well before, and better than, any emoji.
In April 2010, it was announced that Bebo would be shutting down, with unlimited luv available all day for everyone to gift to their friends. Under the impression that extended activity on the site would somehow make the site stay open, my friends and I, as well as many others, stayed on it nearly all day, sending luv and posting emotional and only half-ironic statuses like “Long Live Bebo '' until well past midnight. As it happens, the ship did not sink that day (elaborate marketing ploy maybe?), but my friends and I would still ditch the site mere months later in favour of Facebook, so clearly the loyalty was short-lived.
I would eventually move on to many other social media sites, including Twitter and Tumblr, but few would be as addictive and fun as Bebo. While the other sites would eventually cultivate my political and social awareness, giving me a wider avenue to share my thoughts and read others beyond my comfortable social bubbles, Bebo was literally just vibes, and it was gas. It relaunched again in February 2021, albeit to a limited audience that restricts membership to invite-only. Maybe Bebo’s time will arrive yet again, or maybe not, either way it was fun while it lasted.
