Bebo was the best social network we’ve ever had

Most people think of MSN Messenger as the true face of our awkward millenial prepubescence – that excitement at waiting for your crush to sign in after school was, I’ll admit, probably one of the best things about school days. But think about it – where would we have been without Bebo? It shaped our friendships, it caused endless drama, and it gave us the creativity to define ourselves and to grow into our “skin” (see what I did there).

This is probably what you looked like when you had Bebo. Bedazzled iPod nano and Windows 97 PC.

The friendship list

What better way to stir up shit with your mate than moving them down the pecking order in your Top 14? Or better still, putting the glittery “love her” arrow pointing to the girl she hates, aka your new bezzie. You knew shit had popped off when you were off the list. Alternatively, if you wanted to get in there with that bloke you sat next to in ICT (and you had some serious balls) you could use the blingy arrow method to boldly proclaim he was a “fitty” or “sex on legs”.

You probably could hate her very easily though

Sharing the luv

“Why  hasn’t she shared the luv with me today? I’ve shared it with her twice”.

Sharing the luv was seriously divisive of your social standing. If you had loads of luv, you were one popular kid. If your numbers were pretty low, it was embarrassing to have it on your profile. It was a terrifying day when Bebo announced you could only share it a limited amount of times a day. Shit got serious then. We really had to pick who we liked. And if you didn’t return the favour within the same day, it would kick off.

All of the vital info

Your other half

Aka, your “twinny”. If someone made their actual partner their other half, they were a backstabber and you’d lost them as a friend. Oh well, you had to remind yourself they’d probably be broken up in two weeks anyway. When this function came out it was a Hunger Games style death match to try and secure someone in your group as an other half so you weren’t left out in the cold.

BFFLTTOT 4EVER N EVER XOXO

Skins

Let’s be honest, the best thing about Bebo was the skins. If, like me, you were practically an up and coming graphic designer in your spare time, you could earn major street cred by designing skins for people. And more often than not they would probably look like this:

Those fonts are called Kravitz and Learning Curve, btw, just in case you wanna download

And they’d probably be on the profiles of all the cool girls that looked like this:

THE Year 9 look. The fringe, the earrings, the top. This was the girl we all wanted to be

Your profile layout

This was a big deal. What kind of image did you want to give off? If you were a total indie rocker and well into your bands, you could make a whole right hand column just naming all of your “ear sex<3”. Some preferred to be charitable and donate a subsection to each person in their group and list all the jokes times you’d had together. If you had loads of time and were dedicated to your craft, you could wrιтe ιт all lιĸe тнιѕ  . If you were just SO RANDOM you could proclaim that “rawr, I’m a dinosaur”. Or, if you preferred to stick to the old fashioned method, you could fill in the blanks Bebo provided for you like you were being interviewed for the worst magazine in existence.

A classic straight male’s bebo page. Except the Jungle Book bit. Wtf.

Gotta let everyone know you were a mad joker in class

And of course, the overly edited pics

Blingee was an absolute god send to all Bebo users, as well as the shit photo editing apps on our Sony Ericssons. SO much contrast, SO much saturation, SO much random text on the images.

Nobody understands me

LOL SO RANDOM XD !!11!!1!!

Yeah that’s Nick Hewer. And a Blingee star.

Were you really best friends if you didn’t make one of these?

Always hun xxx

Joker Sans ICT, classic Bebo pic font

The ultimate edit

At least u tried babe xo

So basically, bring back Bebo. What the hell are we doing, wasting our time looking nice on Facebook and Insta? It’s time to inject petty drama and shit photos back into our lives. Bebo, in the immortal words of JB, is it too late now to say sorry?