San Francisco — The Time Warner-owned Web portal AOL on Monday rolled out a bundle of new features to beautify its social networking site Bebo, which it acquired in 2008, adding a “lifestreaming” feature from the social data aggregator SocialThing it also acquired that year, allowing a user to post stream-of-consciousness photos and other comments, including a status update that will sync information from friends’ profiles on other sites like Facebook and YouTube.
Last December, Bebo announced Social Inbox, which aggregates a user’s friends’ activities from their online social life, irrespectively of the network the latter have chosen to work with.
Bebo’s “Social Inbox” feature enables you to view updates from people you are connected to via any service, by aggregating them into your inbox on the site. All you need to do is provide the service with your user ID on all the other websites you are a member of and Bebo will make sure you know what your friends are doing.
The newly announced Lifestream feature to Bebo is based on the same concept as FriendFeed, a service that enables people to broadcast their activities from a variety of social sites. In addition to Facebook and YouTube, Bebo’s Lifestream integrates with MySpace, Twitter, Delicious and Flickr.
AOL on Monday added several more sweetenings to the Bebo service, although not all of them will be available to users immediately.
The move is aimed at bolstering the popularity of social network Bebo, which the company acquired in March 2008 for $850 million. The social network, which remains one of the largest such sites worldwide, has thus far struggled to gain a foothold in the U.S.
With the repositioning of AIM profiles to Bebo, AOL could significantly expand its user base, though it remains unclear how much of a bump in traffic the integration will deliver to Bebo.
Bebo has also introduced a timeline feature called LifeStory, it collects your users uploaded photos and events, and puts them into a album player that sorts them into chronological groups. Basically, it makes a fancy widget out of your life.
“LifeStory is optional, so you can hide it, but we think it is a great way to share the important moments in your life with all your friends,” Bebo’s Alex Brown wrote in a blog post.
Also coming to Bebo is a tiered set of privacy controls, called Social Slider, where users can set filters that control how much information their friends can see about them.
AOL also introduced itself into the online world of classifieds, partnering with Oodle to create Classifieds.AOL.com (Classifieds.AOL.ca, in Canada). Oodle, operator of the US’s largest network of classified services, already has some 250 partners, including such big names as Facebook, Myspace, Wal-Mart, and Comcast.
The site will become the latest in addition to the “AOL Local Network,” which includes MapQuest. The network boasts an impressive 54 million uniques. While the added push of Oodle’s 40 million listing will certainly be a nice launching point for AOL, the real competition in the space is, of course, Craiglist, which, thus far, has proved to worthy an opponent for similar sites, like, say, eBay’s Kijij.