To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control ?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlight heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God :
Is that time dead ? lo ! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance -
And must I lose a soul's inheritance ?

Lets just be clear from the outset. Bebo, the social networking phenomena that has swept Irish colleges in the past few months, addicting a majority of the student population like a wild vampiric contagion, is a wholly unoriginal idea. The site, although managing to cleverly balance its mixture of advertising, content and functionality, and featuring personalisation options like a selection of ‘skins’ and a space for co-opted (and uniformly copyright infringing) flash content, adds nothing truly original to the mix of bulletin board, interest groups, photo hosting and social resume that has existed since rival site Friendster launched in 2003.

Social networks are hub sites. Alternatives to the generic search, email, and news aggregation of portals like Yahoo, they offer a home for users to post mini biographies, lists of their interests, photos of nights out, quizzes, polls and the like. Most importantly, through ‘buddy’, ‘contact’ or ‘friend’ functionality, they connect users in networks of acquaintance – relying on the ‘small world’ or ‘six degrees of separation’ phenomena to build user bases exponentially. These networks (more than ten of which have currently managed to attract over 5 million subscribers), offer a variety of connection models, from the invite only exclusivity of Google owned ‘Orkut’, to the college delimited privacy of ‘Face Book’; yet all share a dependence for their success on their ability to attract large groups of socially interconnected users.

That Bebo is unoriginal, or is in many ways less powerful and elegant than rival ‘Face Book’, matters little to its legion of fans. For most of Bebo’s growing throng of Irish users, the site represents their first encounter with social networking and blogging, and provides a space for the maintenance of an electronic identity. Where Bebo has found success is in, as much through fortune as cunning, attracting the ‘opinion formers’ of Ogra Eireann’s increasingly socially homogeneous cultural milieu. In a time when college attendees resemble more than ever before, drunker versions of second level students; both in their adherence to O.C dedicated fashions, and their general apathy toward both the political process and traditional avenues of post adolescent rebellion, getting key students on board has been enough to sway the ship.
Bebo takes advantage of what the journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell, in his book ‘The Tipping Point’ describes as ‘Super Connectors’. Such individuals, the party boys and girls who grace the pages of ego rags like Dublin’s ‘Bash’, represent their colleges in intervarsity sports, and organise club nights like the uber trendy ‘Hospital’, have rapidly drawn in their wake the bulk of Irish third level students. It is in succeeding to attract such hip and flighty Celtic cubs, that Bebo inc. has managed to cast its net far wider than MySpace, Face Book, Orkut and the rest of its progenitors combined.

No elegantly original combination of design and ease of use seems to underlie the sites popularity, although Bebo (however garish) is less visually dull than Face Book, less advertising infected and downright ugly than MySpace, and both more intuitive and less exclusive than Orkut. Most likely, its success in signing up bright young things lies in both the growing technological familiarity of the laptop and iPod owning college students of Ireland, and the spam like method by which the site encourages new users to add friends – by importing their entire email contact lists. Thus a host of flattering invitations sent by the glitterati of UCD and TCD student life have tipped the boat, ultimately inducing a critical mass of students, primarily female, to post online their photos, diaries and potentially valuable – should Bebo inc. manage to monetarise them in a more targeted fashion than its current crudely impersonal advertising – social network maps. Other colleges hav

My website is at http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~jason