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FRIDAY, JAN 4 (News Locale) - Much to the surprise of many, experts have voted the popular teenager website Bebo as the best performing social networking forum on the Internet. Bebo beat its closest rival Facebook that received an overall score of 74 percent compared to Bebo's 79 percent.
According to the magazine ‘Computing Which?’, Bebo had scored exceedingly for supporting "responsible networking" by helping users to effortlessly curb who can see their information and wedge off undesired "friends".
Surprisingly, Yahoo! Groups collected the lowest overall score among the 10 Internet sites judged by the magazine. Yahoo! Groups has not only scored poorly with 59 percent votes, but the magazine has even described it as one of the lesser sophisticated sites amongst its competitors, as it lacks many of the features that people usually relate to social networking groups.
The sites were judged on the basis of their use, performance and the functions offered by them.
On the other hand, MySpace received an overall score of 67%. Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces scored 65% and the Friends Reunited site at 62%. Interestingly, Saga Zone - aimed at the over-50s - and BBC Talk were given a maximum five star rating for their performance and voted as best buys for users interested in discussion groups.
The experts have particularly commended Bebo website owners’ hard work to improve site’s security and protect younger users from data theft and useless visitors.
The site has also been hailed for providing the users with loads of counsel on security hazards. The experts said that though Facebook has an easy to navigate interface, it received less vote owing to its comparatively poor security settings that are often confusing. Besides, users are often perplexed on how to delete their accounts permanently from Facebook.
Citing the success of Bebo, the magazine editor Abigail Waraker was of the opinion that though social networking sites are growing in popularity, but this did not mean that websites like MySpace and Facebook can rest on their laurels.
He said that if these sites want to remain in competition they need to work hard to enhance their features and make them more acceptable and easy to use. In fact, social networking sites are online groups where Internet users can email friends, leave messages on friends' message boards, share photos and video clips, and download small programs called applets which enable them to play different online games.
Reports say that during August last year, around 6.5 million people in the UK logged on to Facebook and a number of British companies have enhanced pressures on their employees against using the social networking sites while working. There has been growing concerns over the fact that office staff is spending too much time on them supporting the findings that office workers in the UK spend £130m worth of company time each day browsing online. It has been found that almost 40 percent of British adults with Internet access were found to use social networking sites compared with 22 percent in Italy and 17 per cent in France.
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