Once-hot social networking site Bebo has denied a Sydney Morning Herald report that it is closing its Australasian operation.

But Bebo is giving some the heave-ho from its Sydney office.

“We can confirm that there have been some layoffs, but Bebo.com will continue to have a presence in Australia [and] we will continue to operate in New Zealand”. AOL’s London-based Vice President, Communications Sarah Galvin told NBR over the weekend.

Read also: LinkedIn's new NZ boss eats his own dog food

Time Warner’s AOL division bought Bebo for $US850 million. Now, with TimeWarner preparing to spin-off AOL (the pair merged in what is now regarded as a textbook disaster, in 2000), around one-third of AOL staff worldwide are getting the flick.

“We are therefore required to make some difficult decisions about the future of our organisation and its people in order to stay competitive, and are exploring the possibility of centralising a number of our business operations and services,” said Ms Galvin.

She would not say how many staff were being cut from Bebo’s Australia-New Zealand office, but later added, ‘Bebo has only ever had a small number of sales/support staff on the ground in Australia - with its main operation run out of the US.”

One element of the restructure is already evident on business networking site LinkedIn, however, where Bebo Australia New Zealand managing director Francisco Cordero has updated the job title in his profile to add: Vice President Asia Pacific Sales - People Networks at AOL Time Warner.

Telecom in - sorta; TVNZ out
Bebo’s mobile partnership with Telecom continues, with the carrier still selling at least one Samsung phone that directly supports the social network. But while Bebo was constantly name-checked by Telecom chief executive Paul Reynolds at XT’s May launch, you now have to search hard to find any mention of it on the telco’s site. Telecom referred comment to Bebo.

And on September 15, TVNZ quietly ended an 18-month partnership with Bebo. The arrangement saw the state broadcaster selling display and video ads on behalf of the social network.

Now, Bebo is sellng its own ads. Head of Advertising Sales, Dave Walker said at the time. "We've had a fruitful partnership with Bebo. TVNZ will now focus on selling its own products, particularly tvnz.co.nz.”

The year of Twitter
Despite Hitwise and Nielsen (above) stats that show Bebo tanking in New Zealand (read: Mayday, mayday, Bebo NZ is going down), Ms Galvin pointed to a third market tracker, the UK-based ComScore, that offered a rosier picture: “We have a strong and loyal community of around 909K unique users [in NZ] - second only to Facebook which has approx 1.3 million.

But she did concede that “It's been a tough year ... social networking is often considered to be a fickle market - 2006 was all about MySpace, 2007 was all about Bebo, 2008 was all about Facebook and 2009 is so far all about Twitter.”

Gordon!
However, “We recently completed the biggest social networking deal of its kind with Samsung; took our users to meet the British Prime Minister; and launched Bebo Open Mobile and a new Social Games Experience”.

Hmmm. It seems unlikely that New Zealand youth (or any carbon-based life form) will be impressed by a story about meeting Gordon Brown these days.

Standing on the shoulders of Tweeters
The Samsung hook-up is more promising, and Telecom is selling a mobile in the line-up - even if, like Vodafone, it’s making far more noise about its Twitter and Facebook support these days.

Here, Ms Galvin is more pragmatic, adding:

“We have also made major advancements to capitalise on Twitter and Facebook’s unquestionable growth by letting people stay in touch with their Twitter and Facebook friends from within the Bebo experience itself.”