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In one of the biggest deals yet in the social networking space, AOL announced earlier today that it has acquired Bebo for $850 million. That’s actually more money than News Corp paid to acquire the much larger MySpace, though only about half of what Google shelled out to buy YouTube.
According to AOL, they see the deal as an opportunity to marry IM with social networking – something they have already been trying to do to little fanfare with AIMPages. However, I’ve long been intrigued by the possibilities of doing so, which is one of the reasons I was so bullish on AOL’s Open AIM platform announcement last week. Nonetheless, it’s a lot of money to shell out for a social network with very little traction in the US – MySpace is a whopping 67x bigger than Bebo in the states according to some numbers that Hitwise shared with us.
So, let’s put it to a vote:
n{democracy:109}