Bebo’s Coming Back. Will People Care?

Nostalgia is a heady drug - for a little while.

Clark Boyd
2 min readFeb 9, 2021

Remember Bebo?

I steered well clear, but I have memories of huddling round a fridge-sized PC at pals’ houses, waiting for the dial-up internet to grind its gears so they could look at a profile like this:

I have a theory that people only started stencilling ‘Live Love Laugh’ on their kitchen walls when the internet took their Bebo walls away.

With no digital outlet for such formulaic creativity, we all took matters into our own hands. Property prices are yet to recover.

But Bebo is coming back!

The original creator is coding it himself and he has plenty of moolah to back up the venture.

While it is easy — and fun — to mock the chaotic, maximalist aesthetic of Bebo, few would argue against the need for a social media shake-up.

There are two areas where Bebo could improve on Facebook and Twitter:

  1. Communication: Bebo wants to inject some spontaneity into online conversations. They are testing a feature that allows people to have a fleeting chat about an old photo, for example.
  2. Colour: There is a stunning lack of individuality on social media today. We all need to fit within the…

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Clark Boyd
Clark Boyd

Written by Clark Boyd

Tech/business writer, CEO (Novela), lecturer (Columbia), and data analyst. >500k views on Medium. I used to be with it, but then they changed what ‘it’ was.

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