The core product at LOLapps is actually two things: a quiz creator and a gift creator. You may not have much use for these types of applications yourself, but then, you would be in the minority. When it comes to social networks like Facebook, gifts and quizzes are some of the most popular activities taking place.

With the LOLapps tools, you're walked through a step-by-step process which allows you to create your very own custom gifts and custom quizzes which you can then share with your friends.

Essentially, the LOLapps application turns everyday users into application developers - without the user ever really knowing that's what's going on. With clear instructions written in casual, conversational language, the LOLapps building tools hop users through the somewhat convoluted and complicated steps (at least that's how they would appear to an end user) necessary to register as a developer on the social network and get the application published.

For now, the company says their business model is similar to that of a website-creation tool from ages ago: Geocities. Back in the early Web 1.0 days, users could create their own web pages at Geocities and the company made money by showing ads on those pages. LOLapps is working pretty much the same way today, except now the ads appear in apps, not web sites. LOLapps is also using virtual goods to drive revenue in some company-created applications but they will not be inserting those paid goods into the apps created by users themselves, LOLapps CEO Kavin Stewart tells us.

If you want to get a feel for what kinds of applications are being built with the LOLapps tools, we asked the company for the top apps, both quizzes and gifts. Here are the results - do any of these sound familiar?

Top 10 Quizzes

1. What Is Your Future Life?
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/futurelife/
2. What Greek God are you
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/what-greek-god-fdde/
3. What Type Of Heart Do You Have?
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/whatheart/
4. What's Your Best Quality?
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/bestquality-asdf/
5. Which movie star are you?
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/whatmovie-asdf/
6. What type of person do you attract?
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/attract-asdf/
7. What song are you?
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/what-song-are-jcge/
8. What will your Daughter be named?
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/what-will-your-hfie/
9. What video game character are you?
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/what-video-gam-bhdb/
10. What Kind of Music Are You?
    URL: http://apps.facebook.com/musictype/

Top 10 Gifts

1. Guardian Angels
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/guardian-angel-iibg
2. Because You're Special
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/because-your-s-badgc
3. Friendship
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/friendship-ciabh
4. Pinky Gifts
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yildizs-gifts-djah
5. Childhood Memories of the 80s
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/childhood-memo-jhcf
6. Strawberry Gifts
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/strawberry-gif-bggdd/
7. Girly Girl Gifts
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/girly-girl-gi-geheh
8. Forever Friends Bears
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/forever-friend-fbgi
9. SUSHI
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/sushi-ifia
10. CHOCOLATE!
    URL: http://apps.facebook.com/chocolate-bbghb

As of now, LifeStory only displays your updates from within Bebo. While LifeStory features an interesting user interface, it would be nice if it could also (optionally) pull in updates from your activity stream.

In the long run, Bebo is also planning to allow its users to subscribe to updates from brands, bands, and celebrities, whose updates will then appear in their LifeStory timelines.

Lifestream

The new lifestreaming feature was built on top of SocialThing, a small startup that AOL acquired last year while it was still in private beta testing. The new Lifestream looks like a very basic version of FriendFeed, though it doesn't feature too many functions besides the straightforward aggregation of updates from you and your friends. The simple fact that it also aggregates your friends' updates, though, does give it an edge over Facebook's newsfeed.

New Layout

In addition, Bebo also introduced a new layout for its user profiles, though Bebo's users seem to be rather unhappy about this change.

Differentiation through Aggregation

According to the Guardian, Bebo argues that it is different from Facebook, because "Facebook is a closed, proprietary network that brings friends together through one website."

Clearly, Bebo is trying to differentiate itself from other social networks by becoming more of an aggregator. Thanks to Bebo's SocialInbox, you could already aggregate your friends' updates on other services, even if they aren't Bebo members. Bebo also allows you to check your Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and AOL Mail accounts from within the service.

According to Silicon Alley Insider, the new site's biggest addition will be "Timelines," a feature that integrates your photos, videos, and blog posts into a lifestream of sorts that will appear on your user profile page. The Bebo representative said the mockups posted by SAI were "old," but they didn't call them out as being either fake or inaccurate.

This new look for Bebo's lifestream will build on the "Social Inbox" and lifestreaming features launched on the site back in December. That recent addition allowed Bebo users to aggregate their Twitter updates, Flickr photos, and AIM friends along with their webmail from either Gmail, Yahoo, or AOL. (The press release at the time also referred to Delicious as being a launch partner, but after a long hiatus from Bebo, I logged in once again and Delicious is nowhere to be found.)

The social web activity aggregation comes directly from Bebo's parent company AOL's acquisition of Socialthing!, a lifestreaming competitor similar to FriendFeed. Later this month, that social aggregation will apparently be expanded upon in the upcoming version, complete with additional privacy controls and the ability to control your online activities on multiple services from within Bebo, reports SAI. The screenshots they posted also showed that MySpace and Facebook will be included in the new lifestream.

We don't have any official confirmation from the company regarding the MySpace/Facebook integration, but a source recently told us that MySpace is most likely a given, but adding Facebook was trickier...and that Facebook isn't too happy with Bebo about it.

That's easy to believe - Facebook is notorious for making if difficult, if not impossible, to extract RSS feeds relating to your friends' activities so that you have a reason to keep returning to their social network. (Discuss this!) However, you can extract RSS feeds for your own activity, including status updates, posted items, and notes, so this is one theory as to how Bebo could provide Facebook integration - by having their users add the Facebook "My Status" RSS URL to their Bebo profiles. However, we're curious if they've come up with something even more clever and crafty than that.

We're also being told that the new improved version of the social network will have a more grown-up look-and-feel. Is it possible that Bebo has a much brighter future than many give it credit for? We certainly hope so, at least for Bebo's sake.

Image credits: Silicon Alley Insider

According to the announcement, the Bebo Open Mobile tools are as follows (quote):

The AOL-owned (for now) 50-million* strong social networking site is most popular in the U.K., but is still a distant third worldwide, lagging far behind both Facebook and MySpace. This new initiative to deploy Bebo to mobile phones is clearly an attempt to grow their numbers by adapting their site to today's new computing platform: the mobile web. Sean Kane, global head of mobile for Bebo, confirms this, saying the move is a way to grow the reach of the network. "A rapid and global shift towards mobile social networking consumption is in progress and Bebo is committed to leading the way," he says.

Bebo Follows Industry Leaders (Again)

But Bebo is hardly "leading the way" here. Other social networks have been on the mobile web for years and already have offerings that extend beyond mobile-ready web sites to also include custom-built applications for popular handsets like Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and iPhone. In addition, the rise of the mobile web has allowed for even more social networks to spring into existence, such as Brightkite and Loopt, which are both specialized location-based networking services.

As usual, Bebo isn't leading, but following the industry leaders in the social networking arena. While this move may indeed grow Bebo's numbers somewhat, it's doubtful that it will lead to anything more than the usual game of catch-up for the much smaller service.

What's Bebo's Niche?

Bebo, whose web site's design falls somewhere in between the chaotic MySpace and the more structured and trendy Facebook, has historically struggled to define their niche. Case in point: in March of last year, they announced support for both Google's OpenSocial and Facebook's platform - a move that sent a confusing signal since the two platforms were considered competitors.

Then, like now, Bebo tries to succeed by "doing it all," (or so they think) - delivering a mix of services hand-picked from the leading social networks. What they fail to realize is that each leading network defined itself not by being some sort of homogenous blend, but by establishing a clear niche in which they could dominate. For MySpace, that niche was - and still is - music, the reason for the site's existence and now its continuing relevance. For Facebook, the niche was cleaner, more structured profiles (death to glitter text!) and greater focus on both professional and real-life networking.

Bebo's Mobile Tools: No Major Breakthroughs

What Bebo plans to offer in the mobile space will be, like their web site, a bland mix of what Facebook and MySpace already offer. It would have been great to see Bebo do something more innovative - like being the first major social network to incorporate location-based features into their mobile platform. Imagine how great it would have been to see which of your Bebo friends were nearby using the new mobile clients. Considering that the largest portion of Bebo's user base is concentrated in a relatively small part of the globe (the U.K.), an innovative feature like location-based services could have driven adoption of the Bebo platform.

Also missing from the announcement is any hint that AIM (AOL's instant messaging program) will be integrated into the mobile suite. Perhaps it will be at some point - the announcement hints at future initiatives launched throughout the year - but as of now, there's no mention of it. That also seems like a clear miss given that Bebo's parent company is AOL and the IM service was already added to the main web site in 2008. Perhaps skipping AIM integration is a snub towards AOL, who, as rumor has it, may soon be putting Bebo up for sale.

In end, today's announcement is just another example of Bebo's continuing game of copycat and not anything that breaks new ground. However, we're sure some of Bebo's core social network users will be glad to hear that real mobile services will finally become available to them.

* Note: data from comScore via AOL press release

Update: This just in! We've just heard that there may be a new version of the Bebo social network launching tomorrow. That just may prove us wrong on the whole "lack of innovation" thing. If rumors are true, the new version will address conversation fragmentation and will aggregate all your MySpace & Facebook information into your Bebo profile. Now, that could be interesting!

With the release of Utterli Free Group Texting, Utterli - formerly known as Utterz - is hoping to tap into that market, offering the ability to send SMS messages to friends - and groups of friends - for free from within Facebook or Bebo. And, free is a very good price.

For our Facebook- and MySpace-centric US readers, the question, "Why Bebo?" is likely to jump to mind, given that Bebo doesn't often come up in conversation. However, in the UK, Ireland, and New Zealand - places where SMS rates can be restrictive - Bebo has a large market share. This makes Bebo a perfect candidate for this type of service. It's safe to assume that Utterli's ability to reduce the cost of SMS for these users will be met with broad acceptance.

The fact that Utterli is available on multiple platforms provides a fringe benefit, as well: cross-platform messaging. With Utterli, users on Facebook can send short messages to their friends on Bebo without having to establish a Bebo profile. And vice versa. Users already on the Utterli platform have the ability to send and receive messages with Facebook and Bebo users, too.

Another benefit of the new service? The ability to send SMS text across oceans. Which, to date, hasn't been as easy as it sounds without a client application.

"This is filling a need for Web-to-phone and phone-to-Web group messaging - without a client," said Burcell. "No one else is really doing this right now."

Our take? Texting is a way of life for many. If Utterli can find a way to make sending and receiving SMS messages easy, cheap, and accessible, it is safe to assume that they will gain a following.

To test drive the app, visit Utterli's Social Apps and install it on your preferred platform.

"Integrating with Frengo was a breeze and we really appreciate their experience and expertise in mobile. With Frengo we can extend our social experiences to people on mobile phones around the world," said Jia Shen, CTO of RockYou, a launch partner with Frengo on the toolkit. RockYou's "Horoscopes" application is available to mobile users via the Frengo toolkit. Other customers of Frengo include Slide, I Can Has Cheezburger?, Serious Business, and Frozen Bear.

Lance Takuda of RockYou recently confirmed to us that there are slight differences in the Open Social deployments on MySpace and Hi5, and the Facebook platform deployments on Faceook and Bebo. He told us there's about a "20% overhead in supporting" the different deployments of each platform (though going platform-to-platform basically requires a rewrite). It seems likely that because of these differences, the Frengo toolkit includes slightly different bits of code for working with each social network.

It is, of course, not out of the realm of possibility that social networks could build mobile functionality directly into their platforms. Both Facebook and MySpace have been pushing their mobile versions hard recently -- MySpace just partnered with Sprint and Verizon and RIM just announced a million Facebook users on Blackberry -- and it is plausible that they could push developers to the mobile space themselves. Facebook especially has some serious mobile chops with Joe Hewitt on staff, whose iUI is already one of the most popular iPhone frameworks.

Over the past month, we've continued to think a lot about the process of picking a platform on top of which to build an application. We've had a few interesting interviews on ReadWriteTalk that have touched on these issues. Specifically, we interviewed David Glazer, an Engineering Director at Google and one of the champions inside Google of the OpenSocial project. We also interviewed Lance Tokuda, the CEO and Co-Founder of RockYou, a social software company that builds apps on top of OpenSocial and the Facebook platform.

Though the interviews with Lance and David focused on the issues related to platforms for social applications, it struck us that the same dynamics now exist across a number of platforms. For example, in the mobile space there are a number of platforms on which you can currently release a mobile app. We actually covered some of this in our interview with Adam Taggart from Yahoo!'s Mobile Platform. Obviously, with Apple opening up the iPhone platform, the alternatives are growing. Another industry with similar dynamics is the video game market. In fact, Lance actually referenced Electronic Arts as a model for the type of company he is building.

In this post, we'll highlight five common dynamics that software companies need to take into consideration when deciding which platforms to focus on.

Audience Issues

A platform will only be of use to you if the type of user who will find your application valuable is actually using it. Therefore, the first three issues to be considered when picking a platform center around the dynamics of reaching those users and making sure they are the right users for you. Specifically, these are:

• Issue 1: Reach of the Platform
• Issue 2: Growth of Audience
• Issue 3: Value of that Audience

Issue 1: Reach of Platform

Reach is simply another term for the size of an audience. When looking at reach, it's important to consider how many users specifically have the problem you're trying to solve. If a platform doesn't reach your target audience (and you don't anticipate that changing), it is a non-starter to even consider building on top of the platform. However, platforms that efficiently allow you to reach your target audience are very desirable.

For example, at all the tech conferences I've attended over the last year it has been striking that a high percentage of the audience are iPhone users. In one session at SXSW this year, the panelist asked the audience to raise their hand if they owned an iPhone and probably 75% of the crowd raised their hand. If you had an idea to build a mobile application that was targeted at innovators and early adopters in the technology industry, the iPhone market might actually be the audience with the greatest reach for your app. I would argue this is true even if other platforms have more total users right now.

On the other hand, if an application had a broader target market then other platforms might make more sense. That is clearly the type of application that Yahoo!'s mobile platform is targeting. Adam Taggart shared the following statistics in our interview:

We are now in the process of developing a mobile ecosystem that is intended to serve eventually billions of mobile consumers. And I had to use the word "billions" there very specifically because it differentiates our strategy versus other people in the industry. Most of the people who are taking a very highly optimized approach around the specific device type or a specific operating system, which is great ... So if we'll take the iPhone for example, you know, a phenomenal, fantastic device and very, very popular. They will probably sell in the middle of this year their two millionth iPhone ... So while you're promoting a very good experience, you're providing really just a very thin sliver of the total market of consumers out there with phones.

Issue 2: Growth of Audience

One of hockey great Wayne Gretsky's most famous quotes is, "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." In many ways, the art of choosing a platform is very much the same. Companies need to be more focused on the platform that will be most valuable in the future, instead of picking what is most popular at the time of development.

In social applications right now, an interesting aspect of this will be web based email clients. In our interview, Lance Takuda expected that major services would end up leveraging OpenSocial versus using the Facebook Platform or building another platform. Listening to Lance talk about the 250 million users that web based email clients represent, it was clear that RockYou has aspirations to dominate this space. I would guess that rival web app maker Slide is targeting it as well. However, I also anticipate companies focused on improving the email experience, such as Xobni to compete aggressively once the web based email clients go live.

Of course, while web based email platforms serve as a good example, the overarching point is that if you are designing and developing software on a platform, make sure you're building for where the users are going to be, not where they have been, to give your application the best chance of long term success.

If you're really good at anticipating where users are going, you can end up with what is often called the "first mover advantage." RockYou is a great example of this. They were one of the early companies to recognize the significance of the Facebook platform and released numerous social applications as soon as it opened up. They were thus able to leverage that quick response to become 'the fastest growing company in the world in terms of user acquisition ... basically hav[ing] grown to 60 million users in about 26 months.'

Issue 3: Value of that Audience

Interestingly, 'value' can be looked at in a number of different ways. For example, RockYou focuses on an audience's value to advertisers - specifically, in their case, looking at the geography of where users live. To an advertiser, a teenager in the United States is high value demographic, so that is one of the reasons they are specifically building apps for US teen heavy social networks.

However, as we recently pointed out free to end users is sometimes a dangerous approach. You might want to think about the service fees different audiences on different platforms might be willing to pay directly. If you do, it's important to consider how efficient the payment mechanism is. For example, Facebook is building a payment system as an integrated part of their platform.

Technology Issues

In addition to the issues around the audience, you can't overlook the pragmatic issues around technology. Specifically, there are two technology factors you need to take into account:

• Issue 4: Capability to Support Desired User Experience
• Issue 5: Efficiency of Developing on Platform

Issue 4: Capability to Support Desired User Experience

When you build on top of a platform, you often inherit a set of limitations that are either business decisions by the creators or simply technical limitations based on the way it was developed. While we are very excited about the applications coming out with the upcoming iPhone SDK, it is interesting to look at some of the limitations that SDK imposes upon developers.

For example, according to Wired, developers are not able to create programs that continuously run as a background thread. This clearly limits the functionality a group creating an instant messenger tool might be able to create. In this case, I believe it's unclear whether that is simply a technical limitation or a business restriction. It could be a business limitation if Apple were planning on releasing their own chat application, as some have speculated.

On the other hand, the iPhone also has certain capabilities that previous mobile platforms did not, which is why we believe that Apple will dominate next generation computing.

Issue 5: Efficiency of Developing on Platform

Another important issue to take into consideration is how efficiently your team is able to develop its application. Specifically, this takes into account things like how well documented the platform is and what tools have been created to make development more efficient. David Glazer pointed out there is an interesting effect of having a compelling audience (the three issues above) on these tools and documentation being created:

There's a virtuous cycle that goes on where as a particular environment has high reach, it attracts a lot of developers. When it attracts a lot of developers, there's a lot of value in creating the tools to make it more efficient to develop for that platform.

It is also important to take into consideration any situation where there may be slightly different deployments of a general platform. For example, the OpenSocial platform is slightly different on MySpace than Hi5 and the Facebook platform being leveraged by Bebo is also slightly different. Lance Takuda commented:

For example, between MySpace and Hi5, there's only about 20% overhead in supporting both. Whereas from Facebook to MySpace, there's almost a rewrite involved.

He also confirmed that it is a similar 20% overhead in supporting an application across the Facebook and Bebo platforms.

Conclusion

When you look at RockYou's rapid user growth over the past 26 months, it's obvious that people can build successful businesses on top of different platforms. However, it is critical that developers evaluate the right platform for their application. We've laid out a list of 5 critical dynamics to consider. What factors did we overlook or which dynamics should we have highlighted? Please let us know in the comments below!

[Note: This post drew heavily on three recent interviews on our podcast, ReadWriteTalk. If you'd like to listen in on future interviews, please consider subscribing in iTunes or via your favorite RSS client.

Image credits: Audience Photo & Technology Perspective & The Great One

In theory, the system might work, but LiveBook may rely too heavily on its points scheme. Points aren't just used to add lines to the story, but are also a sort of creative currency within the application. It takes 5 points to add a new sentence, for example, starting a new chapter costs 20, and every time you vote for a sentence it costs you a point. Earning points is, according to the FAQ, a matter of inviting new users.

Presumably, having a sentence selected for inclusion also earns you points, but what this adds up to is a book that heavily relies on the popularity of the app to succeed. Since new users only start with 10 points (enough to add a couple of sentences or dole out a few votes before going bust), the app has to be popular or run the risk of having very few users with enough points to contribute -- which would suddenly make the crowd a lot smaller. Right now, the Facebook version of LiveBook has 45 active daily users.

Other Innovative Ways to Write Online

We've looked at a number of innovative new collaborative writing applications on ReadWriteWeb over the past year. Here's a brief overview:

Recently, Sarah Perez reviewed the very slick Protagonize, on which users can work together to create choose-your-own-adventure style stories, as well as more traditional linear collaborative fiction. Last June, we looked at six "fiction 2.0" applications. Collaborative writing apps Novlet, Portrayl, and Ficlets, are still going strong, but Unblokt, has since shut down, which is too bad because it had produced some suprisingly readable fiction (note, you can actually still read the completed stories by navigating to this link).

We also looked at the National Novel Writing Month, in which people attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in a single month. For the 2007 edition this past November, there were a whopping 1,187,931,929 words written, and of the 101,000 participants, over 15,000 managed to crank out a full 50k word novel. For the even more insane writer, there's the 3 Day Novel contest during which people compete for cash prizes by writing a novel in 3 days. They actually publish the winners, some of which have won awards.

On more than one occasion we've mentioned the One Million Penguins Project. A collaboration between De Montfort University and Penguin Publishing in the UK, the idea was to see if a novel could be written by the crowd via a wiki. The result? According to one organizer it was "unlike anything I’ve read before." The novel has been broke up into sections, which you can read online. The banana version may be the oddest.

Clearly, there are a lot of new and interesting ways to write fiction online, and participating in any one of which can be a lot of fun. What's your favorite?

Further, even though Microsoft keeps talking about data portability, this announcement is not about their participation in DataPortability.org. Today's announcement is strictly about contact data, and it is strictly about Microsoft and these five sites. So while it is technically about making some data more open and portable, the old silos still exist -- there are just a few new paths cut between a handful of them. (To be fair, Microsoft's end of the contact data is open to everyone via their Contacts API, which has been around since last April. DataPortability.org, though, is about using existing, open standards to share all user data.)

Microsoft did mention their involvement in DataPortability.org in their announcement of today's news, however, saying that this and it are natural steps in their "pursuit of data portability to put users at the center of their online experience, while at the same time being thoughtful about balancing user security and privacy with the experience." Here's hoping everyone continues to open up.

That sentence in specific drew a vitriolic response from Nick Carr who called it "the saddest, stupidest sentence [he's] ever read." You can't make money from awareness, says Carr, so thinking that awareness is all musicians want is stupid. He's partially right. Recorded music, even though its reproduction cost is zero, is still a product that can and should be sold, and professional musicians want to, need to, and deserve to make money from their craft. But Arrington is also right: there is value in awareness and musicians aren't owed any money from social networks.

It's interesting to note that this argument has been made before about MTV and iTunes, which some musicians feel were unfairly built on the back of their creative material. From a November 2007 editorial by music producer Jermaine Dupri, "If anything, WE made iTunes. It's like how we spent $300,000 to $500,000 each on our videos and MTV and BET went ahead and built an entire video television industry off of our backs. We can't let that happen again. These businesses exist solely because of our music."

Social Marketing Machine

The wonderful thing about social networks like Bebo is that they provide a ton of viral marketing for musicians and other artists. The other wonderful thing is that they're completely voluntary -- you don't have to upload your work if you don't want to. However, because of the massive amount of free marketing that they provide, most artists would be silly not to take part in the love-in.

Bebo's terms of service specifically state that don't "claim any ownership rights in any Content" uploaded to the site, but that by uploading the content artists grant them "a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable license to use, copy, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, communicate to the public and distribute such Content in connection with the provision of the Service and the Bebo Site, including with regard to the promotion of the Service and the Bebo Site on any media whether now known or hereafter invented, whether or not within the contemplation of the parties."

That's a lot of text, but what it basically means is that you own your work, and if you put it on the Bebo site, they might use it to make money. In exchange, though, you get your work exposed to thousands or millions of users of the Bebo service. Or, in other words, you get awareness.

Knowing the terms by which you participate in the site -- and anyone who uploads anything to sites like Bebo should familiarize themselves with the TOS first -- means that you can't ask for compensation later when the site turns a buck. That'd be like going on the TV show "American Idol," then demanding compensation when you didn't win because your performance was part of the show's content for a few weeks.

It should also probably be noted that most social networks allow, and sometimes encourage, artists to install third party widgets allowing them to sell their work via their profile.

Value in Awareness

Most artists know that there is immense value in awareness. Two large music acts demonstrated that this week. First, REM, whose new album will be streamed for free on iLike starting today until April 1, prior to its official launch. Next, Pennywise, who announced that they will be putting their new album on MySpace free for two weeks starting tomorrow.

Why would REM and Pennywise, two acts who have each sold millions of records, give their music away for free before selling it to their fans? They answer is awareness. These marketing stunts will potentially boost concert ticket and merchandising sales, while probably not hurting album sales from die-hard fans (i.e., the fans who buy every album a band puts out). It will attract a "look-in" audience as well -- people who have never listened to REM or Pennywise in the past will give their music a listen because its being offered free. That added awareness and consumer mindshare might translate into a few more fans and in turn translate into dollars down the road.

The "pay-what-you-want" download schemes from Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails would not have worked as well as they did had those bands lacked awareness. If success for independent artists requires the cultivation of "true fans" then awareness is paramount. The service that social networks provide -- free awareness -- is a valuable one for artists. The relationship between artist and social site is symbiotic: artists upload music and gain a following, social networks distribute music and make money.

What do you think? Are artists owed something by social networks if they upload their music there, even after agreeing to a TOS that says they won't be compensated monetarily? Is "awareness" compensation enough or should artists fight for more from the sites hosting their music? Let us know in the comments below.

Within your ubuket, you can create playlists of your media. To include media from the online services, you first enter in your credentials and then look for the "Action" button next to your files. With one click, you can add the file to a list or send the file to your friends.

The Ubuket Player

What's nice about the ubuket service is that it's accessible (or soon to be accessible) in so many different ways. There is an Adobe AIR app (download link) for running it on your desktop, Songbird users will soon be able to utilize a plugin to upload music from their library, iPhone and iPod Touch users can access ubuket from iphone.ubuket.com, and the app is available as an application on Facebook and Bebo. Your ubuket can also be embedded on any web site or blog. Sometime in April an iTunes plugin will arrive, as will apps for Hi5 and MySpace. By May, an Orkut app will be available and you'll be able to access ubuket from other, non-Apple mobile devices.

That being said, I had some issues when I tried ubuket this morning - initially my photos didn't upload, giving me a red circle - the sign of a failed upload, but on a second try the upload succeeded. Also, clicking on the "Home" button didn't seem to do anything in some cases, an accidental click on "Login" required logging in again (it didn't remember me), and overall, the Flash-based widget seemed a little clunky. However, the service is new and still being developed, so it may be worth waiting and seeing what comes of it. I like the idea of a centralized place for online media - especially one that would be accessible from my mobile phone and from facebook. But whether ubuket becomes anything more than a glorified widget is yet to be seen.

The Wall St Journal's Kara Swisher has a good analysis of the acquisition. Her video interview at Bebo's London office also had some interesting facts. In the video Bebo president Joanna Shields said that the UK is Bebo's strongest market - they have 9 million users there. Globally Bebo has 36 million users worldwide, which according to Shields puts them 3rd worldwide (behind MySpace and Facebook). However, the other side of that coin is that Bebo is relatively weak in the US market, where MySpace and Facebook dominate.

The demographic for Bebo is very young and engaged. The 13-24 year old demographic is Bebo's base and Shields said to Swisher that the average user spends 40 minutes per session on Bebo. So their users are "living their lives out online" - which is theoretically a nice way to attract brands and advertisers. On that front, Shields admitted that the US is still the biggest online advertising market, but "UK is a strong second".

As a product, Bebo is kind of a mix between MySpace's anarchic but hugely popular service, and Facebook's more structured and trendier service. Kara Swisher had a nice turn of phrase for this, saying that Bebo is "neater than MySpace and more fun than Facebook". For a good look at the tech backend of Bebo, check out Rev2.org's post from July last year. In the end though, the features are not what differentiates Bebo from MySpace and Facebook.

Indeed, Bebo has struggled to define itself - the fact that the company chose to (at least publicly) support both Google OpenSocial and Facebook is telling. Bebo is not strong enough to beat MySpace or Facebook as a standalone social network; and the AOL acquisition isn't going to change that.

Bebo Platform - How's That Going?

Bebo has always been a step or two behind the other major social networks as a platform. In November last year it announced a half-hearted effort called Open Media, which at the time we called "a white listing of professionally produced, big media content." Then Bebo was one of a number of social networks to join Google's OpenSocial network. Soon after Bebo announced it was adopting the Facebook platform - a confusing signal, as up till then everyone had assumed that OpenSocial and Facebook platform were direct competitors.

The Bebo platform appears to be running smoothly. The Bebo development team posted an update to their blog today assuring us that "the only changes we see on platform are for the better." In the final analysis, it's hard to know what to make of the Bebo platform because it hasn't been a leader in this space as Facebook, Google and now Myspace have been. The Bebo platform has been along for the ride - and it seems like it had little, if anything, to do with Bebo's sale to AOL.

Conclusion

I see a lot of similarities between Bebo and AOL. Like Bebo, AOL is behind other more high profile competititors in its market. Just as Bebo has struggled to make headway against MySpace and Facebook, AOL has struggled to differentiate itself against its 'big Internet co' competitors like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Bringing AOL and Bebo together may be a good technological fit - e.g. adding AIM to Bebo will be interesting. But it's hard to see AOL getting much out of the deal in the US market, considering that Bebo is not strong there. And I'm not sure what business AOL has in the UK market, as AOL really has little brand recognition outside of the US.

What do you think? Perhaps I'm being unfair to both AOL and Bebo by taking this blase attitude. But really, after the rush of excitement today, I think we'll all be back reading and writing about Google/MS/Yahoo and Facebook/MySpace tomorrow...

Previously the Bebo platform was only available to a select group of media and developer partners, including NBC Universal, CBS, NBA, Yahoo!, RockYou, Slide, and others. As of now, there are 63 apps in their Developer website - Bebo obviously hopes to ramp this up quickly now that anyone can develop apps.

As we noted in December, the Bebo platform is almost identical to Facebook's - it is nearly 100% compatible, in that the APIs, markup language, and query language are all the same. So Bebo is supporting Facebook Platform standards currently. Having said that, Bebo still supports Google's competing standard OpenSocial - or at least they will when OpenSocial is ready for action. It's unclear at this point how Bebo will be able to support what is shaping up to be two competing standards!

Bebo has a reported 40 million users and it is the leading social network in countries like UK and New Zealand. Practically speaking, Bebo will be relying on its support of Facebook standards to increase their third party apps well past 63. Facebook has thousands of third party apps, so Bebo is banking on a lot of those getting added to Bebo too.

Related: Hyped New Platforms: Explaining the Difference Between One and the Other

However, in the 7 weeks since that announcement, OpenSocial widgets still haven't been deployed on MySpace, and to many, OpenSocial still feels like alpha software. Read/WriteTalk's Sean Ammirati pressed Google Developer Advocate Kevin Marks on that point during an interview about OpenSocial last week, but Google is reluctant to put a date on MySpace's adoption of their platform.

"I can’t make a commitment on their behalf but they’re very keen on working with us and pushing ahead," was all Marks would give us.

MySpace is continuing to work on their developer platform, announced in October, though they say it will be compatible with OpenSocial. Will that be the extent of their partnership? Or will OpenSocial be fully deployed on MySpace as it is on Google's own social network, Orkut?

With Facebook opening up their platform to third party social networks, and already luring OpenSocial launch partner bebo, MySpace's participation seems particularly important to the success of Google's endeavor.

The appeal of Facebook's platform -- which is already complete (as much as software ever is) and tested in the wild and comes with more than 6,000 ready-made apps -- is a threat to OpenSocial, even though publicly they deny any brewing competition ("The goal of this is to provide infrastructure," said Kevin Marks in our interview, saying that Google would welcome Facebook as an OpenSocial participant).

For their part, Facebook has also said they are open to one day joining OpenSocial or making the two platforms compatible -- a move that I don't think will happen, but would certainly be a great thing for users. As we wrote in November, however, Facebook really needn't fear OpenSocial the way perhaps Google should fear Facebook's platform.