Party's over for social site Bebo

DEAN KOZANIC/The Press

TOO 'BORING'': Billie Fletcher got tired of Bebo and moved on, which is just as well because it's closing.

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Bye Bye Bebo.

Social-networking site Bebo, which has about 630,000 members in New Zealand, is set to be sold or shut down.

Parent company AOL has announced it will not provide new funding to Bebo to compete with rivals, and may sell or shut down the site.

"Bebo, unfortunately, is a business that has been declining and, as a result, would require significant investment in order to compete in the competitive social-networking space," a company statement said.

The site has lost members to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Kaila Colbin, of Christchurch social media consultant Missing Link, compared Bebo to a party that people wanted to leave.

"You go to a party, everyone's having a good time, but suddenly the momentum changes and someone says, `Let's go to the pub'," Colbin said. "And people start flowing out. And when people flow out, there is no way to recover that energy.

"The more you try, the more desperate you look and the more people want to leave."

Colbin said Facebook was the most popular social-networking site in New Zealand.

"Facebook is by far the most popular site. It has 400 million registered members," she said.

"Bebo got the initial momentum, but they never got the critical mass Facebook has. The bigger the party gets, the more people want to go there."

Anthony Rohan, chairman of the White Elephant Trust, said the youth group used to use Bebo to keep its members up to date.

"It was really easy to get information out there to people. But other social media started to take over and there was a lot of spam on Bebo," Rohan said.

Former Bebo user Billie Fletcher, 19, said the site "got boring".

Fletcher joined Bebo when she was 15, using it "a few times a day".

After two years, she switched to Facebook.

Christchurch's Hannah O'Loughlin, 17, had used Bebo, but switched to Facebook two years ago. "I grew up," she said.

- © Fairfax NZ News