social networking | James P. Mahon

In an effort to understand why former social networking mega site Bebo.com has returned like Jesus from the Tomb, I spoke to one of the men behind it all, Shaan Puri a web developer and colleague of the site’s famous married couple creators.

1, Why now?

Bebo went up for auction, and we knew if we made a bold move we could get it. It was a calculated move, relatively low risk, high reward. We had an idea that we were excited about for the new Bebo, so we decided to go for it.

2, How has social media changed since bebo started?

First, mobile devices. Every year, there’s more and more people that are carrying around little super computers in their pocket. The “old guard” of social networks were not designed for that, but they are trying to adapt. We’re starting with a concept that’s made for mobile.

3, what do you hope to achieve?

Make something that millions of people love to use.

4, How soon will we see results?

Within 6 months hopefully.

5, how can the public play a role?

Believe that this impossible comeback can happen. By that I mean, give Bebo a try when it’s ready. From there, the product should make you fall in love with it. Email me at Bebo@monkeyinferno.com

6, any advice for budding web and I.T designers and developers?

Put your product in people’s hands, earlier rather than later. Start learning what excites people and what turns them off, then go back to the drawing board. Also, if you’re a particularly talented developer, join us 🙂

Was he a prophet or was he the messiah, regardless of what role the big J played in the world over the past two centuries he would be very different about spreading ‘the good news’ if he appeared today and used social networking or would he?

@jesuschrist would be an Official Twitter account with regularly daily updates on the path to live righteously, he would be followed by hopefully more people than Justin Bieber or One Direction and would not need to hashtag due to the influence and originality of his tweets.

Youtube would allow Jesus to stream live to more viewers than Felix Baumgartner could ever have imagined for his fall from above and am sure you would be allowed to comment and like and dislike uploads.

Would Jesus use Google Plus for hangouts? More than likely yes, with the apostles, as it is probably easier than dealing with Skype group chat and being recharged constantly unaware to one’s own existence but then Jesus would not worry about money as he needed little, relying on donations like Wikipedia.

Facebook would recognize that Jesus would have a lot more subscribers than Neal Mann and Vin Diesel put together and would recognize the value in letting him remain offline and monitor his wall posts. You could not tag yourself in his pictures but he could tag you.

Jesus may not have a Linkedin Account as his role as a spreader of the gospel would not deem him useful to many job matches but may allow for significant references and endorsements if he chose to get Linkedin.

Tweetdeck would be of use, so Jesus could keep track of his Foursquare and Myspace as well as his other accounts and only have to deliver his message once to multiple platforms.

Finally Jesus would do all this from an android unless he did a clever endorsement deal like U2 with apple but one doubts this would be of interest to him.

Jesus the social networker would generate vast trends, forum threads, Google news results and be Bing friendly.

His audio clips would be on Soundcloud or Audioboo for those to listen and share and he would also be linkedin to Amazon and Kindle so you could download his WordPress blog posts and e-books.

Who knows what Jesus or any of the other prophets would have used if they walked among us today and as the song goes,

“What if god was one of us, just a slob like one of us,
just a stranger on the bus trying to make his way home?”

If he was trying to make his way home he would be using Google maps unless he had an iPhone 5.