Can a Design Save AOL’s $850 Million Buy, Bebo?

Bebo, a social network that was acquired by Time Warner’s AOL division for a whopping $850 million, today launched an effort that allows its users to aggregate various social web services into a brand-new home page. The Bebo service, which is popular in overseas markets and has about 50 million subscribers, is getting a major facelift. While it takes cues from the “news feed” approach taken by Facebook (which took it from another place), the company is going a step further and introducing a new Social Inbox.

Social Inbox essentially allows folks to aggregate not only their web services but also their communications services such as AIM, Gmail, Yahoo and AOL mail into one place. AOL and AIM users can now log directly into the Bebo service using their existing screen names. It allows you to read RSS feeds as well. Social Inbox is based on Bebo’s SocialThing acquisition.

Read more: gigaom.com