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AOL recently informed their employees working on the social networking site Bebo that they plan to sell of or close the struggling business, as the once great social network struggles to keep up with changing times and new competition.

Social networking has undergone a series of changes in recent years, with new ‘minimalist’ networks such as Twitter and Facebook gaining advantages over the more complicated sites such as Bebo and Myspace.

This has proved a great disappointment to AOL, who back in 2008 paid $850 million (£417 million) for the social networking site. A leaked internal memo from John Brod (the AOL Ventures' executive vice-president), said that AOL – which has been undergoing restructuring – had decided that Bebo "was a business that has been declining and, as a result, would require significant investment in order to compete in the competitive social networking space".

Following staff cutbacks in November of 2009, the Bebo team is presumably not at all surprised at the recent developments at AOL, although it's a sad state of affairs for what was once a major factor in the UK’s social networking scene.