Katie is using her Bebo site to "come out" by posting a picture of herself and girlfriend Kristina kissing. Jenny is in a sulk, having just discovered she's adopted, writes Kate Holmquist
Shane hates his teacher so much that he's posted her photograph along with disgusting comments about what he imagines doing with her.
"SeX mUFfin AKA Nutter" from Kent is sharing her soft porn wares with Irish teenage boys.
The big attraction of Bebo for its 24 million users worldwide - 500,000 in Ireland - is that it makes it easy to set up a fun, attractive personal homepage on the internet. Friends can communicate with each other through music, pictures, jokes and games as well as words. Most teens use their pages for mutual ego-boosting and clean self-expression. The other draw is that parents are mystified by it and most schools and universities have banned it, reinforcing its credibility.
Each person's homepage includes a personal profile, a quiz that friends can do to see how well they know you, a section for messages and a "flash box" which can be used to show video clips, including ones recorded on mobile phones. One flash box being passed like a virus among secondary-school students this week is a mobile phone video of a student apparently assaulting his teacher during class. In Jackass style, the male student jumps up from his desk while the male teacher's back is turned and pulls the teacher's trousers down, to guffaws from the boy doing the recording.
Every single day Bebo pages are called up an astonishing 20 million times by Irish users. Since Bebo's launch in July 2005, 13- to 24-year-olds have rapidly become 85 per cent of Bebo's market, and it is now the second most used website in the State (just behind Google). It is also the most controversial.
To Bebo, or not to Bebo? That's the question for teenagers. Meanwhile parents, who wonder what their teens are up to for hours on the internet, are asking themselves whether to interfere or let them Bebo.
"There's foul language, abuse, images veering towards pornography, mobile phone videos of rugby fights and threats of violence by one group to another. My eyes were popping out of my head - I think parents need to be aware," says Peter Kearns, director of the Institute of Education in Dublin.
But Alan Smeaton, father of two teenagers and professor of computing at Dublin City University, says: "Bebo is beautifully simple, a beautiful example of how to grow a web service, scaling up with no delays or access problems. My children use it. I wouldn't ban it. It's just this year's fad. I see it as the internet version of spray-can graffiti or carving 'Mary loves Tom' on a tree trunk."
IT SEEMS THAT Bebo is as wicked or as innocent as its users want it to be, although for the seven people in San Francisco who are Bebo, having to cope with teenage hate-sites and high jinks wasn't part of their rather idealistic plan.
The co-creator of Bebo, British physicist turned computer geek Michael Birch, is bemused that his network has taken hold among teenagers and "twenteens", as twenty-somethings not ready to relinquish adolescence like to call themselves. Bebo wasn't designed for them. Its target market was North American, urban 30-somethings who needed a way to break out of their set cliques and widen their social networks.
"People get caught in 'cliques' and never meet anyone new from another clique, even though that clique meets in the same pub and sits just a few tables away. People know each other to see and socialise in the same places, but needed a way to approach others with similar interests," Birch explains.
"Bebo is designed to relate to and enhance real world social groups. It's not a virtual online or fantasy world. The idea is to create online communities around pre-existing real-world communities and to make those communities more effective by helping people get to know each other better," he says.
Having just won the 10th annual Webby People's Voice award for social networking sites in the US, Bebo is growing so fast that Birch and his colleague, skydiver David Pifke, work nearly around the clock. They can't take holidays, because they are the only ones who know how to work the increasingly complex computer system, which has to expand to meet 10,000 new users per week. This makes Pifke's weekly skydiving a source of stress for Birch, as are the unanticipated problems arising from an unexpectedly underage user base.
POSING AS A 13-year-old girl, I've logged on to Bebo and I'm looking at hardcore pornography - as hardcore as it gets, courtesy of fellow Beboer Ally MacKenzie, porn star. Her explicit wares appear on the homepages of several Irish teenage male Beboers, which is how I found them in the first place. I'm also seeing ads for gambling sites and a dating service that offers me free membership, as a 13-year-old "woman", to meet 18- to 35-year-old men.
When I inform Birch he responds instantly to my e-mail about the site, and by morning Ally and all her Irish "friends" have been blocked from using Bebo (so sorry guys, it was my fault). Pornography is banned from Bebo, which presents itself as a wholesome, family company - there are even photographs of the founders' children on the website. But it sneaks in anyway among the 700,000 photos uploaded to the site daily.
"The homepage you identified was created . . . less than five hours prior to you contacting me. It's typical of the broken window syndrome and was connected with a number of other equally bad profiles created during the past one to two days," says Birch.
"We cannot stop such homepages being created but we are working towards doing more to ensure that our response time is quicker than ever in taking them down. We currently rely on other members to report abuse and aim to turn these reports around within 24 hours. This is a critical mechanism to identify inappropriate content," he adds.
Self-reporting is only partially effective, but it's the only method available for otherwise unmonitored sites such as Bebo. Birch and Pifke are in the process of developing a system of reviewing photos within moments of them being uploaded.
In response to The Irish Times investigation into the suitability for teenagers of the material on its website, Bebo announced last night that it was temporarily withdrawing all advertising for gambling and for dating agencies from its sites in the UK and Ireland.
Next week, Bebo will announce its "biggest initiative yet", with the appointment of two people, one in the UK and one in Ireland, whose job it will be to help keep the site safe for 13- to 24-year-olds. One of the appointees has experience in the area of internet paedophilia detection and prevention.
Bebo already has a cyber-bullying prevention page linked to every site, but wants to do more to educate its users about the dangers, since nine out of 10 teens report having been cyber-bullied.
"In itself, there's nothing wrong with Bebo. It's not sinister," says Liz Cogan, head of Beaufort High School, Rathfarnham, Dublin. But just as two or three bullies can upset dozens of "nice" kids, it only takes one or two nasty comments on Bebo to ruin it for everyone. Beaufort banned the use of Bebo at school and wrote to parents warning of the potential dangers after Cogan discovered that some girls were "saying nasty things to each other" through their sites.
"Parents are at sea with the whole thing," she says.
Anything new frightens the older generation, says John Sharry, parenting author and family psychotherapist at the Mater Hospital, Dublin. Socrates believed that the written word would destroy oral memory. In the 19th century, novels were thought to fill young people's heads with romantic notions.
Parents who try to ban Bebo are being "unrealistic", Sharry thinks. "Our children are going to use it anyway, they'll be using the internet in their working lives and as parents our role is to help them learn to use it appropriately. Parents should take an interest and not just criticise. "Log on and have a look," he advises. "Ask your children what they are doing and have a debate about the dangers and the limits. Use Bebo as an opportunity to talk and connect."
Some parents are content to see their teenagers occupied socially without having to leave the house, while others struggle to put limits on the amount of time their teens spend on Bebo. One mother says: "Every day, the first thing that happens when I come home from work is an argument with my teenage daughter about the fact that she's been on Bebo ever since she came in from school and now it's time to stop and do her homework. She'd be on it 12 hours a day if she were allowed. It's become the major stress factor in our relationship." If it weren't that, however, it would probably be something else. Teenagers and their parents have always argued over limits - it's part of growing up, as Sharry points out.
"Bebo is nothing different than what's been happening through the generations, it's just happening through a different medium," believes Dr Patrick Ryan, director of the clinical psychology programme at the University of Limerick. The language, flirtation and bragging are standard street corner behaviour, but with the added benefit that for the first time in history, parents can eavesdrop, either by getting their child's permission to view their Bebo homepage, or by registering with Bebo itself to get a flavour of current teenage preoccupations.
THE SOFT PORN, bullying and sexual talk that appear on some pages are no more dangerous than their "real space" versions, he believes. "If you don't like what you see, then start asking questions about our society, don't blame Bebo," Ryan says.
As for Birch and co, the money hasn't started rolling in yet. All profits have been invested back into Bebo, which if sold would be worth many millions, although Birch claims to have no intention of selling.
Bebo intended to get revenue by encouraging pub-based social networks to register, whose sites would have drinks company advertising, but that plan is being revised now that many subscribers aren't old enough to drink. Bands and authors are beginning to set up their own Bebo sites to reach the teen and twenteen market and Birch sees this kind of participatory marketing as the future for Bebo. Growing the site beyond the student market is also a major priority.
The problem is, teens won't want to register on a site their parents use, which is one more reason why Bebo may have left its "beautifully simple" days behind.