AOL Buys Suicide Network

AOL is buying Bebo.

Bebo is the third-largest social networking site, just behind MySpace and Facebook (respectively). The news comes at a time when Time-Warner has been dropping hints that they are looking to split from AOL.

AOL is your typical Greek tragedy with an American backdrop: founded as a BBS offering Internet access, AOL quickly became the largest ISP in America before expanding overseas. They developed a very bad reputation very quickly for their snide, rude, and completely unhelpful customer service, as well as their deceptive billing and general business practices. Compounded by their constant updating of their software, which was found to infiltrate literally every aspect of the user's computer, AOL then released sensitive and "private" data to the online world, which allowed savvy Netizens the opportunity to track-down real-life people who had searched for basically anything in the past few years through AOL's Search function.

In 2005, AOL's powerhouse image came crumbling down around them as consumers began fighting back. It culminated in a former user appearing on The Today Show, where they aired a particularly acrimonious service tech's insulting, deceptive, and downright antagonistic behavior toward the man when he called in for the umpteenth time, trying to cancel his services. While AOL apologized publicly, they concurrently began an online "buzz" campaign in which they accused the man of "baiting" the technician. This was all brought to the ground when a former AOL technician released internal documents which clearly illustrated AOL's deceptive billing model and proved that technicians were trained to demean and deceive consumers.

Bebo was recently linked to a spate of suicides which were apparently coordinated, or at least conceived, on the network. While Bebo certainly had nothing to do with this, several young users decided suicide was a great way to increase their online exposure when others in their network who had recently topped themselves were granted memorial sites and tributes by their peers.

A match made in... well, it's a match.

© C Harris Lynn, 2008