Even as Bebo is rumoured to be in sale talks, it has today signed a deal to to allow its 40 million plus members to produce and share content on their mobile phones, reports TechCrunch UK. Bebo’s new client application for handsets is provided by Intercasting, which has the Anthem product for social sites. Yesterday Bebo said it had signed a distribution deal with T-mobile in the UK ,where it also has an existing partnership with operator Orange. In Ireland, Bebo is currently partnered with O2.
Client applications for handsets make for greater integration with the phone camera and the contacts in the SIM card, which is fast turning into the new battleground for mobile social networks. Yesterday Yahoo! said it’s oneConnect software automatically merges your social network contacts with your mobile phone address book. And Danish start-up ZYB (see Mobile Crunch) yesterday launched its Social Phonebook, which uses the SyncML to sync contacts in a Plaxo-like manner with other ZYB users.
Google is Number 1 buyer
some deal metrics would be nice. i.e. price relative to x, y z
Zyb looks very interesting. I wonder how secure it is, and how much of my friends’ contact info can be stored.
It makes me wonder, since Facebook reports 60 million (maybe more now), Bebo 40 million and NetLog 30 million users, then how come the page views for the two latter dont add up to half of Facebooks? Who is checking these figures anyway?
Mark – Simple. Page views aren’t the same as users. You can have a lot of users but the site might be designed in such as way as to not be less page-view oriented. Also, as these tend to be private companies their figures are rarely verifiable. We can only go on what they tell us, other than what a service like Hitwise or Comscore can say.