It couldn't have been easy last March for Time Warner to throw down $850 million to buy Bebo, the third-largest social networking site. Between market share growing pains, heated competition between the dueling titans Facebook and MySpace, AOL's struggles, and increasingly skeptical advertisers, even Time Warner's CEO Jeff Bewkes admitted that Bebo was the "riskiest acquisition" of the year. Nevertheless, Bebo is back today with a new, more open social dashboard approach, attempting to meld the most promising social media content and tools with AOL's global reach that could dwarf even Facebook and MySpace.

Easily the most interesting aspect of Bebo's redesign today is a new "social inbox" that allows users to pull in e-mail and social activity from a variety of competing services. Front and center in Bebo users' profiles now is a panel that can display e-mail previews for Yahoo Mail and GMail, in addition to AOL Mail. Below that is an area awkwardly called "Changes" which can collect friend activity from popular services like Twitter, YouTube, AIM, Delicious, and more. This panel takes advantage of technology from AOL's acquisition of SocialThing, though as of this writing, none of these new features are working very well. Aside from a number of design quirks across the site like out-of-place menus, neither the Yahoo nor GMail modules are actually displaying messages. Only Twitter and Flickr can be added to the Changes panel right now, but Twitter isn't displaying updates from friends, and the Flickr option thinks our username is incorrect.





Bebo's new, somewhat spartan main page features a spotlight carousel and more video content



Despite some launch problems, Bebo faces quite the uphill battle when it comes to garnering the eyeballs that advertisers need to see. In October, MySpace clocked over 76 million unique monthly visitors. Facebook saw 46 million of its own, while internationally it recently cracked over 130 million unique international users. What's worse, as the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) notes, is that ad spending on social networks remains small due to skepticism over user engagement. People typically focus more on the e-mail and social networking tools as they use them, and less on advertising peppered around the content.





Bebo's personal profile page which features external e-mail and social activity,



though many of these new features weren't working for us at time of publication



The bulk of Time Warner's new bet on Bebo is composed of the AOL community, being more open with new applications and integration of competitor's services, and bringing more mainstream media to the site. Perhaps most importantly, the barrier to signing up with yet another social network Bebo has been significantly lowered now that AOL and AIM users can log in with their existing credentials. In fact, flipping that switch on AOL's existing base of 100 million users gives Bebo a potential global reach of 124 million users. And with more media tightly integrated into the site, Bebo is hoping to better engage users and spark more advertising interest and revenue.

In a way, the new Bebo combines some of the best advantages from competing social networks, such as Facebook's news feed of friends' activity across external social services and MySpace's signature partnerships with mainstream media. Bebo already supports both Facebook and Google OpenSocial application platforms, too, boasting over 13,000 apps that can enhance user profiles. Still, the site will need to clean up today's launch and design quirks, provide more engaging features like interaction from the social inbox, and feature more premium content. All of this is necessary to have a shot at convincing any reasonable portion of users to make a switch. Unfortunately for AOL, it may be too late for that.