Bebo.com

According to the Irish edition of the Sunday Times [article not available online] colleges are starting to put an end to the Bebo.com craze. Bebo is a MySpace like networking website that apparently has proven so popular in this country that they have registered 500.000 users, most of them of college age. As a result of its surprising popularity

“NUI Galway, Carlow IT, Waterford IT, Dublin Business School and Queen’s College University, have all blocked access to the site after receiving complaints from students who were unable to access college computers for course-work due to hundreds of other students jamming PC suites to log on to their Bebo profile. (…) There were cases where 35 out of 40 students in a suite were logged into Bebo, which obviously is not defensible as an educational activity.”

OK, personally I don’t care whether or not colleges should ban access to the site. These are after all their computers and they should be allowed to do with them as they please. So no argument here.

What strikes me as odd, however, is the following:

The site has 500.000 registered Irish users????

Let’s see: Last time I checked – well, not personally, but thanks to my friends at the CIA – Ireland had a population of 4,015,676 residents. (Add another 1.5 Million or so for the North.) In 2003 Internet usage was 1.26 Million people, so my guess is that right now it is at 1.5 Million +. One look at Bebo shows that most people are in the 18-22 age brackets. In Ireland there are 342,000 people in the 15-19 age brackets, another 292,000 in the 20-24 age brackets.

And Bebo has 500,000 registered users in this country?!? Wouldn’t that mean pretty much every single person in the targeted age bracket (with or without access to the Internet) is now on Bebo? And yet no-one has ever mentioned it to me and it takes me reading the Sunday Times to first of all even hear about that web site????

Another thing: Bebo is so popular amongst college students, yet the average comment made on it reads like:

“u go gurl haha dat fella dat commented u,u gt ur luks 4rm me haha ye ok woteva treva!!!!!neway ne news avint tlkd 2 in a wee wile i mean properly hehe lvz ya xxxxxxxxxxxxx”

Without going all Lynne Truss, but: WT DE FK? Is that college standard these days?

There I am thinking how very much on top of the game I am as an Irish based blogger with broadband access and interest in RSS feeds and what-have-you, just to learn that Internet usage and development in this country is not driven by the likes of me and that I have instead missed the train altogether. Instead it is sozzled illiterate females that are ahead of the posse. (OK, admittedly there are also guys as members there, but given half a chance I’d rather watch pictures of drunk girls than those of their more awkward, spotty male counterparts.)

Or maybe the numbers reported in this bit of news are rubbish to start with.

Only one way to find out.

Next time I see a bunch of young drunken yobs flashing their, ahem, cameras I’ll simply walk over and say: “Oi, haven’t I seen you on Bebo?” and see what their reaction will be.