Where will journos go now the Bebo Generation has gone Awol?

PRESENT TENSE:NO WONDER Bebo's traffic has plummeted: during its early years, about a quarter of the people using it were middle-aged journalists pretending to be 13-year-old girls and trawling the net trying to entrap perverts. They grew bored with that two years ago. It has never recovered.

The site is in trouble. Its owners AOL, having spent $850 million to buy it, have found its popularity in such decline that they’ve decided to sell it or close it down. You may greet that news with a surprised nostalgia of the kind you normally reserve for episodes of Reeling In The Years. Bebo was founded in 2005. It already seems of another time.

For some time, every journalist was contractually obliged to mention the site when writing anything about teens and civic engagement. It spawned, in fact, the “Bebo Generation”.

You may have been a member. How are you doing? Or have you matured into the Facebook Generation; or taken a diversion into the Twitter Generation; or did you always see yourself as belonging to the MySpace Generation? Or maybe you hated to see yourself subject to such lazy labelling. You know, part of the Whatever Generation.

The Bebo Generation didn’t describe themselves as such, of course. It was handed to them by older folks who found looking at a Bebo page akin to having their eyes repeatedly assaulted by a school yearbook. They are still there, those endless walls of vowel-free words and exclamation marks; RANDOMLY capped GREETINGS!!!!!; and pictures that seem to have been taken by a falling photographer.

So, the phrase quickly became a slur of sorts, a shorthand to describe an age group whose minds appeared interested in only two things: the other sex and mangling the English language. It came to typify a stereotype of teens as being self-absorbed and trivial, ignorant and intent on dragging educational standards to unparalleled depths. When, in fact, it had simply become a temporary answer to that eternal and agitated parental question: “just what the hell are they up to in that bedroom all day?” Not going on Bebo, has been the recent answer. In cultural terms, the Bebo Generation had the life span of a mayfly with a heart complaint.

FOR A TIME, it was the most popular social networking site in Ireland. Bebo claimed that it had a million Irish users by 2007. But soon it may be added to the relics of digital culture.

In February, Bebo’s global unique visitors amounted to 12.8 million, down 45 per cent in a year. Contrast that with the 462 million visitors to Facebook, 110 million to MySpace and Twitter’s 69.5 million.

Bebo is an interesting study of how something seems immensely consequential one minute and entirely irrelevant the next. It was, briefly, the future of social networking. It happened instead to be just another evolutionary step, a transitional species.

Bebo staff were this week reported to be blaming AOL’s lack of funding for its demise. The site’s not dead yet, but for the moment sits in a purgatory with Friends Reunited, swapping hard-luck stories about how the initial, self-started success took a sharp turn downwards once it was bought over by a giant.

But there was a portent in how infrequently the “Bebo Generation” is mentioned these days and in how the media had stopped fretting about it; stopped trawling the millions of pages in search of a few morons it could hold up as typical users.

Social networking has always posed awkward questions about privacy and manipulation, but subtleties were less arresting than such headlines as this from the Daily Mailof September 2008: "The dark side of Bebo: If you think your children are safe having harmless fun on social networking sites, think again."

There was never a Daily Mailheadline that shouted: "If you think your children are chatting to perverts or juggling knives on Bebo, think again. They're probably playing Solitaire. Or learning how to spell incorrectly."

So, perhaps the problems got sorted. Maybe the more hysterical media realised it was unfair and narrow-minded to salivate over only the most extreme aspects of a cultural phenomenon.

Hold on, what's that recent Daily Mailheadline? "Chat Roulette: Exploring the disturbing webcam service that connects you with strangers."

So, that’s what journalists are up to in their bedrooms all day.