I saw on Forbes this morning that Time Warner is buying the social network Bebo for $850 million. My experience with Bebo hasn’t been great so far, it’s a blend of the best parts of MySpace and Facebook, but without the reliability or audience size of either. Granted my experience has been narrow - focused primarily on application development after they launched their platform based on the Facebook’s FBML.

AOL, the Internet division of Time Warner, said on Thursday that it was buying the social networking site Bebo for $850 million in cash, placing it in position to go head to head with News Corp.’s MySpace as well as Facebook.

What AOL fails to realize is that it’s original online presence was in fact a social network that they channeled into a portal. Now they’re looking to buy the 3rd - albeit a distant 3rd - largest social network to regain their original community of users. Kind of sad actually. Stats on the top 3 networks from complete.com below. Notice bebo’s not much more than a blip on the radar of MySpace and Facebook. As they say, “good luck with that.” I hope they don’t spam all the Bebo users with free AOL CD’s.