Bebo Save likely? AOL finds potential buyers.

Bebo 2010

We’ve been following news stories this past month about the Bebo situation. Previously AOL decided it needed to cut costs by dismantling Bebo or selling it. Tim Armstrong revealed that there were potential parties interested in buying Bebo. The exact companies who are purchasing Bebo has not been revealed at this time. Though we do know of one individual who will not purchase Bebo.

• Parties not interested in purchasing Bebo
  • Michael Birch

Michael Birch founder of Bebo, in a previous interview with Telegraph, states:

“Most social networks have gone into gaming and I think somebody will buy Bebo from AOL as it still has still has a lot of unique users a month and that’s valuable”

He believes AOL will not get the original price of $850 million when they bought the site from him, but at least they can cover part of their losses. He also believes the demise of Bebo, as well as other popular websites can occur when large companies buy a product in which they do not understand.

An insider explained to Telegraph that a core reason behind the fall of Bebo was how AOL did not listen to the feedback of it’s users and focused towards implementing AIM/AOL features, instead of fixing bugs. We’ve covered a few of those bugs in the previous blog posts of last year, however, those were mainly focused on AOL/AIM integration to Bebo, and not the other way around.

Michael Birch believes Zynga would be a great purchaser of Bebo. Zynga currently focuses mainly on games, particularly social games like Farmville.

[via telegraph + buisnessweek]

With the initial news of a possible Bebo shut down, users created their own petitions, groups, and websites dedicated to Save Bebo. You can read our initial observation here.