Tutorial 6 Online Communities

Chosen Community: BEBO

Bebo web address: http://www.bebo.com

What this community is about:

"Bebo is a social media network where friends share their lives and explore great entertainment."


Bebo enables people who are signed up to it to contact friends from their childhood and link up with new friends. On Bebo you can share and comment on pages, photos, add videos and music, add blogs to your page, private message people, join groups and bands and lots more. Bebo is a very interactive social networking site - you add friends or friends add you, you can comment on your friend's page, blog, photos, - there is even a tally of how many people have visited your profile. You can create your own polls and quizzes, create a white board for people to add drawings to your page, even make your own group.

Bebo facillitates "socialability" to the extent that peopole who join have an easy way of communicate with friends, no matter where they are, as long as they have access to the internet. Social networks allow people to keep in touch with friends in other countries.

There are different types of Bebo pages and therefore different topics. There are the personal pages where you can decide who may view them. There are groups that you can become a member of. Some a funny and some are serious. Theres groups that are less disscusion and are a way of uniting with other people who believe the particular group.

Ethical issues include, people who make their pages public to anyone in the world tend to face strangers using their identities for their own Bebo pages. More recently, Bebo has had hackers who steal peoples identities and send rude messages to that persons friends. There is no way of stopping this- and it is a pain signing on to your Bebo and finding you have 7 rude messages which looks like they have been snet from your best friend. Any one can copy peoples photos. Anyone can comment.

Bebo is absolutely fanastic to keep in touch with friends and family who are scattered all over the world! Keep in touch with friends in Australia, you can send them a message and they can reply straight away... its free, no phone bills, you can send photos and know that the person is actually going to recieve them- as emails do not always work. However, this is not as good as actually being able to speak to these people who are far away or actually spend time with them. But is great to keep in touch between visits.