Multiple blogs such as Techcrunch and Mashable are reporting that popular social networking site, Bebo.com, turned down a $550 offer from British Telecom. This doesn’t surprise me, and in my opinion probably the right move for Bebo. Bebo has definitely not reached their peak and this offer is similar in price to number of members ratio as the myspace acquisition. Bebo knows it is going to be growing rapidly over the next 6 months similar to what Myspace did. A social networks value is in their members plus their target/niche market. Since Bebo’s target market is everyone,...

Mashable reports that friendster has won a patent in social networking. From the original Red Herring article: “The new Friendster patent covers the basic steps involved in joining a social network: entering a personal description and relationships to other users, mapping relationships and degrees of separation, and connecting to others through these friends.” No word on if Friendster will pursue licensing fees from their competitors, but if they do it could seriously hinder the social networking scene. This could be a saving grace for friendster, and provides more insight into why...

Valleywag reports an unconfirmed rumor that NBC is to buy social networking site Tribe.net. Tribe has been around since 2003 and works off of local area interest groups. Tribe would fit the bill for NBC as they recently bought iVillage, a community for women, for $600 million and just struck an advertising deal with YouTube. This comes as a saving grace to Tribe’s investors as back in June it was also reported by Valleywag that Tribe was severly struggling and considering shutting down the whole operation. [tags]Social Networking, Social Network, buy out, nbc, Tribe,...