Dead Phone + Bebo + AOL = FAIL

I’ve wanted to be a journalist ever since, whilst studying politics, I realised that most politicians never achieved anything and that those who hung on to their morals & beliefs also tended to be the ones who ended up sticking most tightly to the backbenches.

However I was never prepared to do my time reporting on the Women’s Institute Annual Fair for the Surrey Gazette or something similar, so the advent of blogging was for me, as for many other millions an absolute Godsend.

So imagine my excitement when, earlier this week, I picked up a text from a contact at AOL which read, and I’m pretty much quoting this word for word:

We just bought Bebo. You didn’t hear it from me, ok?

Was I excited? Well, actually no. I was gutted. You see I’d been at a client meeting all day and had just got home where I’d plugged my phone in as it had run out of battery hours before. If it had been charged, and I had posted about the takeover when the text had actually arrived I would have beaten just about everyone to the exclusive.

Even TechCrunch who claimed to have broken the story last month, even though they only listed AOL as a possible suitor, along with just about every other major media or internet company with the money:

we are still betting on Google given that Bebo fits well with Orkut…Microsoft has been mentioned as another possible candidate…Other potential buyers [include] News Corp…Yahoo…AOL, CBS, Viacom, Comcast, others

Well done guys, you guessed that Bebo would be bought by a company with deep wallets and an interest in the web – score!

Still, I guess that this should just act as a lesson; I am destined to be someone who comments on the news that others make, rather than someone who makes the news. Oh well, I’d probably have ended up with Dustin Hoffman playing me rather than Robert Redford anyway

N73 image by Imamon on Flickr

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