Bebo coming back with ‘brand new social network’

(Getty Images)

Bebo is returning, in the form of a “brand new social network”.

But it is not clear whether the new version of the site has any connection to the old one, beyond borrowing its name and its old web address.

It has also made clear that it does not have access to the content that was posted on the site.

“PLEASE NOTE: All old data and photos were lost many years ago and are not recoverable,” a message on the new version reads. “Sorry.”

Beyond that, there is little information on what the new site might be. Its website says that it is “currently in private beta” and it is only possible to access any of it with a password, which the website says has been handed out to people who have been invited.

“Bebo is coming back in February 2021 as a brand new social network,” the page reads, under a banner indicating that the website is “coming soon”.

Other links to important information – including an “about” and “help” page, as well as one that would give information about its privacy policy – do not work.

Bebo was founded in 2005, and quickly went on to become one of the world’s most popular social networking sites. It unseated MySpace as the UK and Ireland’s biggest social network in the late 2000s.

But it went on to pass between a range of companies – including AOL – it went bankrupt in 2013. Since then, it has re-emerged in a number of forms, most of them unrelated to the old social network, such as video streaming software.

It was for that software that the Bebo company was acquired by Amazon-owned live streaming service Twitch, in 2019. Reports at the time suggested that the deal had been done for the technology underpinning Bebo’s own live-streaming platform, and that it would be integrated with Twitch.

In the wake of that deal, the Bebo.com website went down. Since then, it has been used to redirect to a number of unrelated websites, according to records maintained by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

At some point in recent days, the site has been updated with reference to the private beta and the indication that the site would be coming back online next month.

Twitch did not immediately respond to questions from The Independent  about whether it was involved in the re-launch, and both the new website and its registration give no information about who might be running it, and there is nothing explicitly linking it to Twitch, Amazon, or its previous owners.