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AOL has officially completed its $850 million acquisition of social networking site Bebo. It has also created a new business division, People Networks.

Published: 20 May 2008

AOL has officially completed its $850 million acquisition of social networking site Bebo. It has also created a new business division, People Networks.

Joanna Shields, former president of Bebo, has been appointed as the executive vice-president of People Networks.

People Networks will integrate AOL's other community applications and tools, including instant messaging, chat and e-mail into Bebo. Users will be able to merge AIM and Bebo profiles so they can use common screen names without re-registering. In addition, People Networks will integrate other recent AOL acquisitions, including widget technology company Goowy Media and social search question and answer service Yedda. Integration plans also include the cross-distribution of AOL and Bebo content and applications to expand the scale of the combined networks.

"AOL is now fully focused on growing our business in three key areas - our advertising network, publishing and people networks - by delivering relevant content and advertising across the web, and we're making great progress in each area," said Randy Falco, chairman and chief executive of AOL.

AOL also expanded on how it plans to monetise the new joint operation. It recently announced a new "content screening tool" for advertisers, to help them measure the quality of a users' web page and place adverts only on those pages that surpass a quality threshold. AOL will be rolling out this technology in the second half of the year, and will hope that building its Platform A advertising network into the Bebo social network will extend the reach of its ad business.

The companies also announced plans to roll-out international versions of the site in at least six different languages over the coming months.