AOL released new aggregation features on their Bebo social networking site today.  Similar to FriendFeed, the new features – called “social inbox” – allow you to aggregate content across multiple social services, including Twitter, Flickr and AIM instant messages.

CNET has a longer review of the new services here, some of which won’t debut until January.  But I thought it would be fun to blog about my personal experience trying to sign up for Bebo, and how it went.

A disclaimer: this is intended to share my amusing experience with Bebo, and nothing more.

1. OK, I can sign in with my AIM ID.  Crap, I don’t remember what the password was.
2. Well, it took a few attempts but I’m in.  Oh wait.  I have to validate my email address?  I thought I already did that with AIM.  Oh well.
3. Okay, validated my email address.  I guess I can use my Gmail account to see if my other friends are on here.
4. Hey, some of my friends are, but 200 of the other email addresses in my Gmail address book aren’t.  The default option is to invite everyone, so all 200 checkboxes are set, and there’s now way to mass unset them.  ARGH!!!!
5. Ok, I give up on trying to add friends, on to the next step.  Oh, I need to create a profile, okay.  Ahh, nice one Bebo.  The default gender is Female, since “F” comes before “M”.  You could’ve at least added two options: “Select one” and “Not telling.”  And… WHOA.  That is a long form.
6. I tried to skip everything and just save my profile, but Bebo didn’t like what I entered for a name.  So what if I want to put numbers in my name?!  What if my name really was JohnSmith1224124???  The exact error message: “Your name must be your real name.”  Deep, AOL.  Real deep.
7. OK, done… For now. Except now Bebo wants me to find friends again.  What if I want to be antisocial?
8. Alright, let’s take a look at my profile page now!  Uh. Ok. That’s a little empty looking.
9. Going to swing over to the settings page just to see what I can set. Well, I don’t have many privacy controls, but I do have some.  That’s good.  It would be nice to be able to create categories of friends, and have different levels of privacy and security, but some settings are better than none at all.
10. Found this at the bottom of the profile basic profile settings page.
11. I must be crazy.

Filed under: Consumer Web, Social Computing