Bebo’s coming back.
It’s the Return of the King, the Comeback Kid, the Rise of the Walking Dead.
The iconic social media platform’s return to the online sphere was announced today (January 29) to much reverence.
Our photos are gone, our profiles have been lost, we haven’t been given even the tiniest bit of information about what this new network is going to look like, and yet, we rejoiced. Because Bebo was the true king of social media – and in fairness, it still is.
Bebo wasn’t the last of the quote unquote “real” social medias, but it was without doubt the most innocent.
You think you’d perch nicely at the top of everybody’s Top 16 these days? You think people would make their own abominable skins on MS Paint? You Think Some Users Would Opt To Capitalise The First Letter Of Every Word When Leaving A Comment On Your Page? Not a hope. We’ve come too far for such juvenile nonsense.
And yet, wasn’t it those quirks, that cringe inducing content, those painful attempts at communication that made Bebo so perfect?
Wasn’t it the poorly drawn whiteboard pictures, the self-aggrandising quizzes (How well do you know ME?), the sweet stench of desperation as you begged your friends for their one ‘luv’ of the day what made it so special?
Social media isn’t like that anymore. It’s not raw. It’s not as fun either. Bebo emerged during a period when many users were still relying on dial up to set up a profile. It thrived during a time when every teenager would be inactive for eight hours a day, until they returned home from school, bet through their homework, and managed to log on.
That sense of longing is gone – the excitement to rush back to the sitting room (or if you were middle class, the parlour) and see who had posted on your page, who else had added you as a friend, who had uploaded a new offensively large skin header featuring a grainy poorly proportion photo of your new favourite emo band.
Social media is so available to us now, so inappropriately immersed in our regular lives. Looking forward to going online doesn’t exist anymore, it’s just there. Bebo was a small corner of our worlds where we could share the innermost workings of personalities, or what we thought our personalities should be.
It was shouty, it was brash, and it was the absolute fucking best.
Bebo returning is exciting. It could be a return to the golden age of social media, a time where anything went and no one was safe. It could be a deeply immersive nostalgia trip. It could be entirely shite but it’ll still be ten times better than most of the social media we’re expected to put up with these days.
Bebo has been relaunched multiple times since it was first shut down. Each time the reboot has inevitably failed to match the original, returning as some desperate attempt to rake in a new generation of users or simply introduce an entirely different platform altogether.
There’s every chance that this relaunch will emit the same disappointing response. We’ll be all hyped up with nowhere to go, except for Twitter, ironically, where we shall lament what we lost and what could have been.
#BeboMemories will trend once more. We will dump our partners via the Other Half function. We will communicate only through Blingee gifs. We will be whole again.
