Bebo is a popular social networking site that also features band profiles. Finding the sign-up form for a band profile is tricky. I first started out by signing up for a regular user account and kept waiting for them to give me the option to make it a band account, but they never did. I finally found the appropriate sign-up form, and once I filled out the form to add my band, nothing happened. There was no confirmation to indicate that the form was accepted. Nor did I receive an email confirming that my band had been added, or with information on managing my profile. I did, however, notice on my personal profile that I was suddenly marked as a "fan" of my own band, and clicking on the band name finally took me to the band profile which I was allowed to edit. Of course, my band name wasn't available as a username, and I had to append the word "band" to my Bebo username/URL.

Overall, Bebo is a confusing site. It's difficult to maneuver and definitely not musician friendly. It's similar to Facebook in that there is no direct way to edit your band profile. You instead need to login with your regular username, and then navigate to your band page to edit it. If you're not careful, you will quickly find yourself wondering whether you are making changes to your band profile or your personal profile. There seem to be a number of "transitions" throughout the profile editing process that just don't make sense, or at least don't explain themselves well enough. For example, after I uploaded my band profile picture, I was taken to a page instructing me to "Click on your friends' noses to tag them". I have no idea what they were talking about. There were no pictures of my friends anywhere on the screen. I tried it again, and it worked the second time around.

Profiles suffer from the same ugly box format that you see on other sites like Myspace and Mog. I would prefer that they at least hide the sections that are blank or empty. There are lots of skins available for your band profile, although many of them are branded with logos from lame television shows, public service announcements, or advertising for the armed forces and slick photos of Japanese vehicles. Many were uploaded by Bebo users, although they rarely took the time to create separate skins for each section of the profile, choosing instead to simply duplicate the same header graphic in a smaller scale all over the page. Which looks ugly. I'll probably just have to create my own at some point, or just stick with the default. You can also add various widgets and plugins to your site, including some from popular sites like iLike.

MP3s uploads are limited to 10Mb in size, so some of my 320kbps tracks wouldn't fit and needed to be down-graded in quality. They don't have a progress bar while you're uploading, either. They have a store feature for selling music that is setup via 7Digital's Indiestore interface, so if you have an account at that site it is quick and easy to add tracks for sale at Bebo.

There's more to the site, although there is nothing quick or really intuitive about building up your profile. It involves a lot of manual input, like many social networking sites. Adding album info is very tedious, and you need to remember to first upload your album covers if you want to use them for your albums. Unlike Facebook and other sites that implement on-the-fly Ajax programming for these types of input forms, at Bebo you are required to enter in the tracks for your albums one by one, each time clicking on the submit button and waiting for the page to load again. Uploading photos is also a chore, and requires that you run a slow Java application within the browser. On top of all of this, Bebo is peppered with obnoxious advertising, such as those dancing Obama bank refinance ads. If Bebo wasn't such a popular site, I'd probably just leave my profile blank.