The big new twist on Bebo’s lifestreaming features is that it will automatically import all of your friends' activity on the different services you register, even if those friends aren’t Bebo users. This functionality comes by way of Socialthing, the social aggregator that AOL acquired last summer, and is a similar but more automated concept to FriendFeed’s “imaginary friends.”
At launch, Bebo is offering support for Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and Delicious. That’s a smaller number of services than the competitors, but the company is hoping that with its unique ability to pull in activities from your disparate friends automatically, it can make up ground. Another way the company hopes to do that is by getting celebrities into lifestreaming – they tout the fact that a number of prominent artists like Miley Cyrus and All-American Rejects are already using the features.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Socialthing hadn’t even left private beta when it was purchased by AOL, but it did seem to make social aggregation a lot easier to get excited about, since it leveraged your existing social networks and didn’t entail having to find a whole bunch of new people to follow, ala FriendFeed. There’s also AIM integration coming, wherein AIM profiles become Bebo profiles, which could lure millions of new people into the site.