So, signed up to Bebo and what do I think?

In looks it's a classic Web 2.0 site - big chunky navigation, rounded corners, bold colours combined with subtle fades, lots of white space.

Signing up was easy. The profile had just about the right mix between preset fields and flexible fields that you can customise as you like (or cut and paste directly from Facebook, which I cut and pasted more or less directly from LiveJournal and so on...)

But there seems to be a walled garden approach. There's nowhere on my profile where I can enter the URL of my web site (it's http://steve.pugh.net) and it lacks the one feature that really sold Facebook to me - the ability to import my blog RSS feed so that I can update my main blog (http://www.stevepugh.net/VTT) and have the posts appear automatically on my Facebook profile.

There are also far fewer of my friends already signed up than on Facebook, MySpace, Last.FM, LinkedIn or LiveJournal. And no "Also on..." feature that lets me list my membership of all these other network memberships.

Sorry, but my online presence is widespread and diffuse and any
site that doesn't join the party is going to get left out.

So, okay design, good usability, but poor networking. Probably not a keeper.