In an unexpected move, AOL announced that it has entered an agreement to acquire Bebo for $850 million, the number one social networking platform in the U.K. Bebo was a startup founded in year 2005, experienced exponential growth especially in the U.K. and attracted more than 40 million users worldwide. Also valuable is Bebo’s principle of original content, it has pioneered the blending of original content in the social networking industry by co-producing a TV show entitled “Kate Modern”.

This was an important move for AOL in its bid to seriously challenge the leading position of MySpace and Facebook, and also put to rest rumors that AOL is pursuing a deal with Yahoo! in the midst of Microsoft-Yahoo! merger plan.

Bebo, headquartered in London, has approximately 100 employees operating in offices in the UK, San Francisco and Austin, Texas.

To know what’s going on Bebo, watch the video of Joanna Shields, President of Bebo discussed about Bebo, as embedded in the below.

O2 Ireland has partnered with a social networking site Bebo in launching a new mobile service. Under the deal, O2 Ireland subscribers who are also Bebo users can access to the mobile version of Bebo site and perform some activities such as view their profiles, upload photos, receive alerts or post comments by text message from their O2 phones. It seems that now the mobile network operators not only know to invest capital in next-generation networks, technologies and systems, but also know the importance of achieving exclusive partnership with the leading social networking sites in order to remain competitive in the market. Recent example is the partnership of Vodafone and MySpace.

This partnership definitely provides a sufficient critical mass to get the attention of O2 Ireland and Bebo users, since the service will be offered free of charge until November 30 this year, after which time O2 users will be charged a weekly subscription fee of EUR1.50. Additionally, O2 Ireland has an agreement with Bebo to provide the service exclusively to its customers until March 2008.

It is important to recognize that each social networking site made its own strong growth in certain market, such as MySpace and Facebook in the U.S., Friendster in Asian region, Orkut in Brazil, and etc. Now a research showed that Bebo was the most visited social networking site in the U.K., with 10.6 million users logged on to this site in July particularly.

Bebo, a San-Francisco based startup has recently closed deals with Apple and France Telecom-owned Orange respectively so that their users can buy iTune on Bebo site as well as to offering a Bebo version of mobile phone.