AOL has announced that it is acquiring social network Bebo for $850 million in cash. Bebo has about 40 million members. Bebo is especially popular in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand and has over 100 staff across its London, San Francisco and Austin offices. In January 2008, Bebo had 22.4 million unique visitors worldwide with visitors averaging more than 3 hours and 30 minutes on the site during the month. 4.8 million unique U.S. visitors came to Bebo in February 2008.  Bebo’s revenues for 2006 were $7 million with $3 million in EBITDA. In 2007 revenues were $20 million with $5 million in EBITDA.

AOL announced that it has acquired Yedda, Inc., a semantic social search Questions and Answer service. Yedda will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL. Yedda was founded in 2006. Yedda employs approximately 20 people and will continue to operate in the U.S. and throughout Europe. Yedda’s R&D center will continue to be based in Israel. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

AOL has acquired Israeli start-up Yedda, a social search questions-and-answers service with proprietary semantic matching technology which was launched in 2006 . No financial terms were disclosed.