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The knife-wielding cast of 'KateModern.'

(Credit: Bebo)

Bebo doesn’t just want to be that social network that AOL bought–it also wants to be a hub for entertainment.

The site, now part of the Time Warner unit’s “People Networks” division, has appointed the London-based Kelly Brett as its head of original productions.

Brett had last worked on KateModern, a Bebo-hosted video series created by Lonelygirl15 production company Eqal (then known as LG15 Productions), and she also counts projects for television networks like the BBC, Sky, and ITV on her resume.

The youth-oriented Bebo, with most of its popularity concentrated in the United Kingdom and Ireland, has hosted several original series, in addition to KateModern: Gap Year, Sofia’s Diary, and The Secret Life of Sam King. Sofia’s Diary was later picked up by the U.K.’s Channel Five network, making it the first British TV show to arise on the Web. In the United States, the buzzed-about Web series Quarterlife was picked up by NBC but canceled after a single episode due to low ratings.

Brett’s first project is the currently airing Sam King, a collaboration between Bebo and Universal Music about a fictional Universal mail room employee whose dealings with real-life bands and artists are detailed in the comedy series.

The “social network as entertainment venue” model has been explored in varying degrees by different companies; in the U.S., the best-known example of the phenomenon is News Corp.’s MySpace, which hosts the occasional original show on its MySpaceTV platform. It also served as the platform for the final episode of the syndicated Lonelygirl15.

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Bebo appoints exec to handle original content

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Modeling The Real Market Value Of Social Networks

At the many advertising conferences dotting Internet Week New York this week, speakers and panelists have been exhorting the ad industry to start thinking more creatively when it comes to tackling digital media–even creating elaborate branded series in lieu of traditional commercials.

They weren’t the only ones who got that memo. Record label Universal Music Group’s Universal Music U.K. announced Monday that it’s partnered with social network Bebo to broadcast a series called The Secret World of Sam King: one part video blog, one part Choose Your Own Adventure, and one part Universal advertorial. It’s being produced by Globe Productions, a division of Universal.

The premise of the new series is that Sam King, an extremely low-level fictional employee of Universal Music, decides to found his own record label in the company mail room. Along the way, he encounters real-life Universal artists, and viewers will be able to submit opinions, send in material, and suggest which bands Sam should scout.

The show will also be fueled by product placement, with handset manufacturer Sony Ericsson signing on as the inaugural brand sponsor. Apparently this will lead to the protagonist “winding his boss up with mobile phone-related pranks.”

Bebo and Universal have not provided a concrete debut date.

Universal’s concept of a “brand show” is a bit similar to Back On Topps, a series created by former Disney exec Michael Eisner’s video start-up Vuguru, as a promotion for the trading card company (which Eisner himself owns). That series, premiering this week, also pits fictional company employees against the celebrities affiliated with it–in Topps’ case, famous athletes.

For Bebo, which has its biggest audience in the U.K., and parent company AOL, its 42 million members get video content that will (ideally) be enjoyable and will keep them around. It’ll also be cross-promoted across other AOL video brands. For Universal, creating an (ideally) hip show geared toward Bebo’s young users could help recapture the attention of a generation that’s turned away from the major labels and in the direction of BitTorrent.

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Universal Music U.K. to debut series on Bebo

Bebo’s core demographic might be teens and young adults in the U.K., but President Joanna Shields said that now that the social network’s acquisition by AOL is complete, it’s time to start expanding. Now that she’s in charge of AOL’s “People Networks” division, which encompasses Bebo as well as the AIM and ICQ instant-messaging services, her goal is to expand the service’s reach and bring it up to par with bigger rivals like Facebook and News Corp.’s MySpace.

“If you look at Bebo (a year ago) it was much more of a youth brand,” Shields said in an interview with CNET News.com Monday. “It looked younger, it had a younger feel to it, but over the course of my time here, over 18 months, we’ve evolved the DNA of the site, we’ve matured it.” While the Bebo of the U.K. and Ireland will retain a youth vibe, the feel will be much more universal when it “expands into new markets,” per Shields.

Additionally, as Bebo creeps into new geographic territories, advertisements will be served by AOL’s Platform A technology, not by current ad partner Yahoo. Bebo’s U.S. site will also transition from Yahoo to AOL ads.

“In each new market we go into, of course now that we have this extraordinary technology, we will launch with Platform A,” Shields said.

Yahoo will continue to serve Bebo ads in three regions. “We have a very positive relationship with Yahoo in the U.K., Ireland, and Australia,” Shields explained. “That current relationship goes until the end of 2009.” She declined to specify what the plan would be after that, but she did say that she expects Bebo to be exempt from the difficulties some other social sites have on the monetization front because of its focus on media consumption rather than just communication.

“Sending an ad to someone who’s communicating is quite different from someone that is consuming entertainment,” she said, mentioning Bebo’s original video programming as well as its “Open Media” platform, which partners with companies like MTV Networks, the BBC, and ESPN. “There’s no surprise that we ended up with a media company, or a company with a media heritage, given the part of the spectrum of social networking where we reside, the category we tried to create–a social media network.”

Shields said it’s too early in the AOL ownership to be able to gauge whether Bebo would be launching a data portability project like Facebook’s Facebook Connect or MySpace’s Data Availability. “I’m a firm believer that you’ve got to be open,” she hinted. With regard to further developer-related announcements, she explained, “We’ve been through this quiet period through the acquisitions…We haven’t yet socialized those discussions with the AOL folks because we’ve been operating independently.”

Bebo’s application platform is notable because it’s compatible with both the OpenSocial standard and Facebook’s application code.

But right now the mantra is expansion first. “My goal and the goal of our team is to expand distribution,” she explained, “and to build and to expose the Bebo experience to more and more territories.”

Bebo president: We’re not just for kids anymore

All gold rushes must come to an end, and according to one new report, Facebook’s developer platform is no exception.

Facebook developer Jesse Farmer, creator of developer analytics service Adonomics, did an extensive amount of number-crunching after coming to an odd observation earlier this year: “Something is wrong in the Facebook developer community,” Farmer wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “Starting in March I began noticing that the level of activity in the Facebook developers forum was dropping sharply.”

Farmer’s research confirmed his speculation: activity in the Facebook developer forum, from posts per day to highly active users, had fallen notably from January to April. In other words, that likely means there’s less activity on the part of independent developers hoping to tap into Facebook’s massive audience.

One possible reason, Farmer wrote, is the fact that Facebook isn’t the only hub for social-network application developers anymore. Google kickstarted the OpenSocial standard last year, and Bebo, newly acquired by AOL, is currently the only social network that supports both Facebook and OpenSocial applications.

It could also mean, as Farmer pointed out, less chatter taking place in an open forum as application creators grow more concerned about the effect of competition in the packed developer space.

Or perhaps, he suggests, small-time developers might be disillusioned. Facebook, in an effort to curb spam, has instituted new regulations that some developers find controversial. Then there’s the presence of big application companies like Slide and RockYou, which dominate the rankings of the most popular Facebook applications and have valuations in the hundreds of millions. Not only do they dwarf smaller developers, but they also snap up programmer talent that might otherwise be independent.

“Networks like Zynga and Social Gaming Network have cropped up in the last few months and have made it their business to consolidate the game space on Facebook, probably the only real vertical that has found success on the platform,” Farmer wrote. “Bigger companies like Slide and RockYou have been actively recruiting from the Facebook developer pool all along, too.”

Is the Facebook platform doomed? Hardly. But if Farmer’s research is accurate, it’s a sign that the initial frenzy is finally quieting–it’s been a year, after all.

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Study: Developer activity on Facebook’s platform is slowing