I dug up my old Bebo profile…and it’s pretty cringe

Boring as it may seem, employers look increasingly at our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, to try to judge the people we are and how we’d be as potential employees, and unfortunately Candy Crush high scores don’t mean a lot.

65 new levels to waste my time and ruin my life.

Maybe because I’m painfully close to graduating, but in my final year I’ve become more and more paranoid about how I look on social media. In an effort to feel better about my current social media maturity, I made the brave decision to dig out my old Bebo profile from 2009 to track my progression as a person. A kind of Bildungsroman for a digital age.

Bebo was at one point Ireland’s most visited website, and it was huge. Remember Bebo drama? Awful. Now that it’s gone bankrupt and obsolete we can commemorate it fondly. Or not so fondly.

Bebo, we hardly knew ye.

Like digging out an old diary, there’s an inherent cringe and then nostalgia for a simpler time. A time when the worst part of your day was not getting your mate’s ‘daily love’, and judging from the painfully embarrassing quotes in my profile, I thought The Hangover and The Mighty Boosh were the height of cool.

Can I report abuse for how much this made me cringe?

Remember backgrounds? Before cover photos, kids. My Bebo background (thankfully expired now that the website is sadly under maintenance) was an homage to ‘karma’. This probably has more to do with the fact that as a Bebo teenager I was a huge bitch rather than my thoughts on philosophy.

Now, on Facebook, we can deal with the pain and panic of being tagged in a horrible photo by a swift untag and a shudder. Apparently in the days of Bebo, I relished in documenting a latent emo phase. Truly awful.

I was rocking the ugly selfie before Cara Delevingne even knew it was a thing. Just sayin’.

The only reason this Bebo still exists is because I’ve forgotten the password to log in and just repressed its existence. Sadly, I remembered my URL (spelling mistake and all, oh the shame) to find it, and I’m not sure how much good it’s done me.

To be fair, retrospectively seeing how annoying I was makes me feel a lot better about my drunken Facebook statuses, Candy Crush requests and grovelling tweets to celebrities today.

I’ve still retained some of my bebo personality to this day, a shameless love for Pete Doherty for instance. And before the newsfeed, Bebo did teach me first how to creep. It’s also nice to see that some of my friendships from the prehistoric pre-Facebook days are still going strong. For instance, here’s myself and my housemate enjoying the fact that we managed to sneak into The Globe/Elms to celebrate her 17^th birthday. It was the best, evidently.

My fake ID must have been very convincing.

In fact I might start bringing along a print out of my old Bebo to job interviews “You think I’m bad now, but look how far I’ve come!”

Truly inspiring.