It’s been confirmed that AOL has lightened its load some more, with the sale of Bebo. Criterion Capital Partners is the new owner of the social network, with the deal being led by managing partner Adam Levin. It may have been a bitter end to a short but bumpy ride, with AOL having far overpaid for Bebo back in 2008. Even then, it was clear that AOL was a little too excited about getting its hands on Bebo, which was still holding its own in relation to Facebook and MySpace.

With the initial acquisition of Bebo reaching $850 million, the reported sale price is closer to $10 million. What a huge loss. AOL set itself up for that one, with its huge goodwill writedown of Bebo last year. The social network, originally launched in the UK, saw a nosedive in sales after joining the AOL family, though Bebo was already headed towards decline. At the time of the acquisition, AOL was still a part of the Time Warner umbrella, with higher expectations around sustaining that type of an investment.

And then? Bebo was neglected and became a thorn in AOL’s side. As one of the biggest and riskiest acquisitions of the year, Bebo was almost doomed for failure. Even with the numerous changes AOL has made to its services and structure, the focus on advertising was lost on Bebo’s teen-driven social mechanisms. Sadly, that’s not too different from other entities AOL acquired–the company has also offloaded ICQ and buy.net this year.

Next for Bebo: Network, partner up and mobilize

So what now? Criterion Capital Partners has quite an undertaking with its new social network. Specializing in turnarounds, the investment firm will probably look to sell Bebo relatively soon as well. Only this time, profits are expected to be involved. Focusing on the social activity on Bebo and leveraging it for monetization purposes, Criterion could breath new life into Bebo yet.

With the number of tools towards furthering Bebo’s existing platform, the network could take advantage of its cooperative abilities to tie in with other services and networks. Even beyond Facebook, Bebo could come out OK if it successfully navigates the current convergence of social media and commerce. MySpace has started down a similar path, with a focus on its own platform and how it can best serve its users.

As the social networking thing has already been done, Bebo’s focus should now be on providing its users with services they’ll actually need and use. As the development of social commerce began, this revolved primarily around social gaming. It’s grown to encompass a great deal more, particularly as mobile phones have provided an ideal gateway for serving both sides of social media and commerce.

From there, I imagine some strategic partnerships could help Bebo regain its footing. In a landscape where Facebook has become central and dominate for regular communication and media-sharing, utilizing Bebo as an interfacing tool for interacting with aspects of Facebook and other portals is something that can be highly developed at this point in time.