Bebo is launching a major redesign of its user homepages this morning, its first since being acquired by AOL for $850 million earlier this year. The changes give us some idea of what we might expect from Bebo going forward, and it’s much as you might expect from the social network now that it’s a part of AOL: tight integration with AIM, easy access to email, multimedia content, and in a bit of a twist, social aggregation features of the FriendFeed variety.

I’ve long believed that IM is perhaps the ultimate social graph – contacts organized into groups that you can contact in real-time. And while AOL might have missed out on its opportunity to cash in on this early in the social networking boom, AIM still boasts more than 28 million users per month according to comScore. Will Bebo be the golden goose that finally makes this concept a success? Here’s a look at what they’re up to:

Instant Messaging

Bebo now lets AIM users login to the site using their screenname and password. And, similar to other data portability initiatives, that means you’ll be able to see which of your AIM buddies already use Bebo, giving you an instant social network when you access the site for the first time. You’ll also be able to chat with those friends through a buddy list that has been integrated into the Bebo interface, which combines your friends from both Bebo and AIM.







Social Aggregation

Back in August, AOL made a significantly smaller acquisition – FriendFeed competitor Socialthing. The service – which was still in private beta when AOL bought it – is a major part of the homepage, allowing you to see updates from your Bebo friends from other services like Twitter, Flickr, and Del.icio.us. Bebo plans to open this up to allow you to subscribe to updates from friends who don’t necessarily use Bebo, so you can see everyone’s updates in one place.

Email

While checking your email is seemingly easy enough on its own, Bebo has decided to integrate it into their user’s homepages. You’ll be able to check accounts on AOL, Gmail, or Yahoo Mail, with support for users of Microsoft Exchange email expected early next year. This isn’t full-functioning web-mail, rather, it’s just notification of new messages. This feature seems like a bit of the “build a better mouse trap” philosophy of portals like AOL and Yahoo, but nonetheless, could be useful for those that don’t keep email open 24x7 in its own tab.

Multimedia Content

One big advantage of being part of AOL and parent company Time Warner is that Bebo has access to a lot of multimedia content. Bebo users can subscribe to this content, and now in the new design, receive recommendations based on their interests as well as what their friends are watching or listening to. As opposed to a video destination site like Hulu, Bebo hopes to make this tool more about social discovery – finding new content to watch based on what your social network is consuming.

Final Thoughts

I like where Bebo is going with this. While the social network itself is huge in the UK, in the US, it’s relatively small compared to giants Facebook and MySpace. Rather than try and compete directly with these social networks, they are taking concepts that are proving successful with so-called early adopters – like lifestreaming – and trying them with a mainstream audience.

And while AOL already tried unsuccessfully once to turn its dominant IM platform into a social network (AIMPages), at the time, they didn’t have the meat of a top-tier site like Bebo behind it. This time around, Bebo will also become heavily integrated into the actual AIM software, which should drive much further adoption. While one can certainly still question whether Bebo was worth the lofty price tag, it’s at least somewhat re-assuring that there is a coherent strategy coming into place around it.