Social Networking’s Next Phase by Brad Stone, New York Times (March 3)
Cisco just entered the social networking arena by buying Tribe.net and Five Across. "But along with the recent purchase of a social network design firm, Five Across, the deal will give Cisco the technology to help large corporate clients create services resembling MySpace or YouTube to bring their customers together online. And that ambition highlights a significant shift in the way companies and entrepreneurs are thinking about social networks."
Will social networks be as ubiquitous as web sites? Marc Andresson, founder of Netscape, must think so. He has just started Ning.com. "“The existing social networks are fantastic but they put users in a straitjacket,” said Mr. Andreessen, who this week reintroduced Ning, his third start-up, after a limited introduction last year. “They are restrictive about what you can and can’t do, and they were not built to be flexible. They do not let people build and design their own worlds, which is the nature of what people want to do online.”"
Cisco does think that mainstream consumers will spend time in these networks. "After the Five Across acquisition, Mr. Scheinman [of Cisco] said in an interview that Americans were quickly changing their media consumption habits. He said his new group would let Cisco help its media customers, like TV networks and cable companies, develop their sites and move more of their content onto the Web."
One big challenge is to persuade people to deal with the registration routines in these communities. "To solve the problem, several firms are pushing a standard called OpenID, which would let users sign on and easily transfer profile information among social sites."
Posted by Gwen at March 6, 2007 11:13 PM