I have mixed feelings personally. Since I\’ve been in the online community for many years,it is gratifying to see that it\’s finally being taken seriously, but I worry about it becoming just another bottom line only part of business….

White label social networking provider Mzinga, which officially launched at TechCrunch Boston this past November, has announced its acquisition of Prospero Technologies, another social networking company that we covered in a roundup awhile back….

http://boompya.com

Interesting to get other people’s thoughts on where the industry is going, although I didn’t see anyone who’s actually developing social network software post so I’ll go ahead and say how CrowdVine is experiencing it.

@michael chin: You’re right about innovation. There’s a ton, driven by two things. One, people are still figuring out how to niche networks are different than MySpace/FB. There’s still a ton of room for exploration in that area. Two, there’s a ton of emerging standards that are going to change how social networks look and behave (open social, data portability). The standards are just emerging, so it’s probably two years before we start to see the effects.

Re: moving to verticals. We launched a product for the conference vertical as an aid to attendee networking. It’s been hugely successful and also opened our eyes to the way social networks can be reapplied to specific problems (in this case as an aid to attendee networking).

Re: consolidation. There’s a set of these companies that wants to make products that are similar to FB/MySpace in order to attack the consumer market, i.e. places to hang out. Gina says something about Ning that’s essentially, “like a party where you never run out of activities.” That’s a tough road to take: high feature requirements, long time to profitability (ad supported), high infrastructure costs because of the need for high volume, losing potential acquirers (Yahoo), and most of the existing competitors are very well funded. I could see how people here would want to consolidate.

Re: services. If you aren’t doing the above and want to attack professional use cases there seems to be plenty of opportunity. If you’re small, profitability doesn’t seem that far off either. We broke even last year after an August launch and have already booked 50% of our revenue for this year. It’s probably easier for us to get to profitability because our costs are low (we’re just two people), but I’m sure we’re not the only company capable of running lean.

http://www.crowdvine.com

Interestingly though, Delphi Forums and TalkCity are both high-flying products of the dot-com boom that Prospero snapped up in 2001 (presumably from a bankruptcy court auction) and relaunched, with some success since both sites still had good-sized communities.

Cheers,
Doug

Perhaps Mzinga will be able to improve Prospero.

TechCrunch is the best blog on the planet. Keep up the great work! Your readers appreciate the up-to-date information.

Have a nice day.

It’s a commodity because the technology is more accessible than ever, but it doesn’t mean that all are created equal. For example, one of the questions people ask is about innovation and where/how that is happening. If you’re evaluating any SaaS vendor you ask if they’re going to keep coming up with cool new sh*t, because you’re handing over the keys to them (in a sense), i.e. you’ve realized that it doesn’t make sense to build it yourself.

http://CelebritySurgery.net

That’s not a dumb question at all. “White label” means you can rebrand the software.

In this case, any company can create their version of Facebook or MySpace

the Big List of White label social networking sites is here:

http://www.web-strategist.com/.....platforms/

I cross linked at the bottom back to this post

Over 1 yr in the making

I think he gets this right…the same way as social networks evolved from the general ones (Myspace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut, etc) to niche ones (Youtube, Linkedin, Eons.com, Sermo.com, etc) the same way the social networking software packages will evolve…