Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Paedos?
It’s hard to believe that it’s only five years since – amid a torrent of tabloid-generated moral panic and hysteria about “what your children are getting up to on That Internet” - Bebo arrived on the scene. Alas, having been offloaded for a mere $10m by its former owners, AOL, its days finally appear to be numbered.
Four years ago, when I felt as though I was the only person under the age of 25 who wasn’t the owner of a Bebo account, I would have happily danced on its grave. Today though, it would feel a bit like celebrating the death of Ariel Sharon. Good news, but too harmless to really matter anymore.
Few, apart from a handful of barely-literate 14-year-olds, the occasional paedophile, and thousands of undercover tabloid journalists (posing as the former whilst attempting to snare the latter) will mourn the eventual demise of what was once the most popular website in Ireland. For a long time now, it’s been languishing in a persistent vegetative state, hooked up to a life-support machine, having long since reached the end of its natural life. The most amusing thing about the whole affair is that the writing was very clearly on the wall two years ago, when AOL hilariously spent the best part of a billion Dollars on it. It puts my 2004 purchase of a Sony MiniDisc player into perspective.
Unlike Bebo (and Murdoch’s beleaguered Myspace), Facebook and Twitter remain in the ownership of their founders. No doubt their eventual deaths will happen not long after they’ve been sold for billions, but with their popularity yet to peak, it’s very difficult to see them reaching the end of the road any time soon.
It’s easy to criticise Facebook for its lax attitude towards its users’ privacy, or for the fact that it has been scientifically proven that it’s easier to escape from the clutches of heroin… but let’s not forget that, without it, the infamous Ireland versus France match would never have been replayed. And without Twitter, we would have had to wait until Gerry Ryan’s family had been informed, before finding out that the tragic shock jock was as dead as a Bebo.