it appears that Tribe has been acquired. Cisco has bought the site and its shaky 2006 issues. Techcrunch weighs in on the recently published NY Times article….

You read the title correctly. Cisco Systems bought Tribe.net. Cisco is that company that makes routers and switches. They bought Tribe.net, a not-very-popular social networking site. If Cisco paid any more than $100 million, we’ll call this the d…

Jeff the important things that IdeaStorm or IdeaCrossing having in common is that I haven’t heard about them, and neither has anyone else! (I could be proved wrong later, but …)

DaveM: I completely agree - I did some university work on this back before it was trendy SNS should really be like email - a generic standard that’s built into other applications. It’s only then that the really interesting applications like ripple become possible. Even being able to do things like opening a Flickr album only to people with an OpenID from a certain URIs [e.g. openid.facebook.com/myuni/*] would be a start.

We had the man responsible for tribe’s no h/core p0rn policy in our office at Zopa last week. He took a lot of hate for that. I hope Cisco know that they’re getting into

Cisco offers products that enable communication. Instead of backbone hardware … looks like software this time. They don’t have to be trendy or cool to pull it off. Just offer a robust, easy to use community platform that any company can incorporate into its website.

My take is: Cisco approaching into social networking market with Web 3.0 idea of integrating everything: voice, data, entertainment, home video, blogging, personal identity, etc.

Cisco Systems has made a couple weird acquisitions lately, they had purchased FiveAcross, a social networking provider, and now they are buying a “failed” social network, Tribe.net, who was once being considered for purchase by NBC. Everyon…

According to Ning’s web site, “When you create your free social network on Ning, we run ads on the right hand side of every page to support the service. That’s our main source of income.”

So Ning makes the bulk of its revenues via Adsense. As click-through rates are largely out of their control, the key driver they are focused on is maximizing users * average page views. They want to serve up their platform to as many social networks as possible. That’s why I can set up a ning social network in like ten seconds for free.

Cisco on the other hand has a built-in install base of thousands of wealthy corporate clients. These clients we can assume are interested in very different things - either creating branded social networks for their customers or launching internal social networks for their own organizations and supply chains.

Either way, they’re not going to want Google’s text ads running down the right-hand side of their web pages. Thus I would imagine that Cisco will look to set up their social network product line as a recurring revenue service, and they’ll want to enable high levels of customization, security, and client control. Their ultimate product won’t even resemble or compete with the likes of Ning. It’s unlikely that if Boeing wants a social network that they are going to plop down $10 a month to get Ning’s corporate package. They will want something industrial strength, and thus turn to John Chambers and Cisco, who is already selling them their internet infrastructure hardware.

Does Boeing build their web site using Front Page? No, they hire their advertising agency, who then outsources it to Razorfish and marks it up 200%. Likewise, they don’t buy Ning. They buy Cisco Social Networks.

PS - Gina, call me. We’ll have lunch.

Andressesn is so full of it.

Cisco is a leader in optical switches. Ning is a NOBODY in social networking. Making that statement assumes that Ning is at least a player when it hasn’t gotten any traction in anything as of yet.

Nevertheless Gina (the CEO) is hot tho. Maybe that will count for something…. LOL

It’s conceivable that Cisco’s enterprise customers would consider Five Across for internal communities of interest, behind the corporate firewall. Tribe could be applied by the cable MSOs or even Telcos to help them develop consumer communities, like a SaaS business model.

Cisco intends to be a force in consumer electronics, which was the focal point of their “Human Network” vision demonstrated at this year’s CES in Las Vegas.

…The enormity of the stupidity amazes me. Companies should focus on what they do best. No corporate customers are going to buy more routers if Cisco throws in a social networking app for free…..
At least some entertaining quote has come out of thi…

Isn’t Cisco one of the *very* few cmopanies that have been successful with the whole buyout-and-integrate routine?

Sam rightly pointed out Linksys. There are other examples too (I bet I could remember them if I’d cared to read about Cisco in the last few years ).

“it’ll be interesting”