The Odd Couple of Social Networking

In early March, a router giant, Cisco, purchased Utah Street Networks, the owners of a social networking site tribe.net. Cisco did not buy the actual social network community (which is comprised mainly of those involved in the Burning Man, but rather, the underlying technology so that they can focus “on infrastructure products to help digital media content owners improve the consumer experience.”

Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape and owner of his third startup, Ning, which allows social networking space to be designed and integrated to other social networking sites. He made the remark “the idea that Cisco is going to be a force in social networking is about as plausible as Ning being a force in optical switches.”

At first, I thought this was just friendly trash talking because Cisco may be a direct competitor with Ning (both are browser based tools for developing social web apps), but Andreesen may have a point. What kind of a crowd in the social networking scene actually likes large corporations? How can Cisco attract/create a social network? Not only are there plenty of options for social networking out on the internet already, but also I feel that anyone creating a back-end has enough knowledge in php, asp, and html to come up with all of this without paying Cisco.

Again, this comes down to profitability and payoffs of the users. The product Cisco purchased, may be on the order of a rounding error on their income statement, and may not have severely impacted their bottom line. However, if they are unable to draw a crowd, which seems very unlikely, there is no payoff for anyone to join. Also, everyone who wants to have a social networking space, has most likely acquired one and will be unwilling to switch. However, we won’t know what Cisco plans with their recent acquisition. Maybe it’ll be geared towards the corporate environment, which I believe, will be the only market that will welcome the technology.