Bebo founder to relaunch social network

The site offered a customisable design with a focus on blogs and photos

Michael Birch, who famously bought back Bebo for $1million five years after selling it for $850million, said the new-look site would focus on “real-time” interactions rather than the news feeds at the core of its rivals.

Speaking to BBC News on Wednesday, the British entrepreneur said his aim is to create a “refreshing break” from the misinformation-strewn social networks that have arisen over the past decade.

We’re calling it live social networking – when you’re logged into Bebo, you are aware of which other friends are online, Birch said in a video call from his home in the British Virgin Islands.

You can interact with them in real-time. You can comment on their photo on their profile. They’ll get notified, they’ll come to the photo, and they may even have a conversation under the photo, he said. It’s an experiment, we’ll see how it how it actually does. But we think it’s a more exciting way of actually connecting.

The 50-year-old launched Bebo in 2005 with his wife, Xochi Birch. At its peak, the social network boasted 40 million users.

The site was popular in the UK and Ireland, offering a quirky and customisable design with a focus on blogs, photos and questionnaires.

In March 2008, the Birches sold Bebo to US tech giant AOL for $850million (£650million).

The deal has since gone down in history as one of the worst made in the dotcom era.

Over the next two years, Bebo struggled to compete against emerging networking giants like Facebook.

It was sold to Criterion Capital Partners, a small private investment firm, in 2010 for a fraction of what AOL paid.

In July 2013, five years after the doomed AOL deal, Birch paid just $1million (£760,000), to buy Bebo back, saying that he planned to reinvent the site.