Comments on: More Consolidation in the White Label Social Networking Space: Mzinga Acquires Prospero

By: Karsten Schmidt

Karsten Schmidt — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:31:00 +0000

Hi,

I just came across your discussion. Do you know already the solutions from http://www.siteforum.com ? Since a few years we offer social networking software, also as a White Label Solution.

Yours
Karsten from Germany

By: Social Software: Here Come The CMS Vendors

Social Software: Here Come The CMS Vendors — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:03:12 +0000

[...] CMS Vendors sniffing the social space Fast forward to 2008. With the demand and buzz for social network features, or community offerings, these established CMS/Portal vendors recognize the demand, and see opportunity dollars falling through the cracks. I’ve started conversations with several of the big players to gauge where they are headed. Of course, the conversations don’t end up on this blog (unless they give me permission, or publish first) but it’s quite obvious where things are headed. In fact, see my predictions I made to Techcrunch. [...]

By: List of “White Label” (Applications you can Rebrand) Social Networking Platforms

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:40:21 +0000

[...] 19, 2008: ONEsite Acquires Social Platform. March 3, 2008: Mzinga acquires Prospero March 4, 2008: Demand Media buys [...]

By: Weekly Digest of the Social Networking Space: March 5, 2008

Weekly Digest of the Social Networking Space: March 5, 2008 — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:58:47 +0000

[...] Mzinga Acquire Prospero Mark at Techcrunch gets the story about Mzinga increasing it’s stature by this recent acquisition of Prospero, my thoughts are on the TC [...]

By: Online Community Discussion

Online Community Discussion — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:03:11 +0000

\”Community\” Getting Serious…

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….

By: socialcmsbuzz.com

socialcmsbuzz.com — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 01:26:23 +0000

More Consolidation in the White Label Social Networking Space: Mzinga Acquires Prospero…

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….

By: gman

gman — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:49:43 +0000

On my journeys through the internet I have seen over and over people trying to compete with the likes of the dating site’s like plentyoffish.com and the community’s like facebook.com but I have never seen a someone put the two ideas together. That is, a comprehensive community with the aspect of dating. There is this new site boompya.com that has actually accomplished just that. With the ability of IM, talking to friends of friends and to have both public and private friends it is the first and hottest dating/community on the web. Check it out.

http://boompya.com

By: Mircea

Mircea — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:34:58 +0000

Another list of white label social networking software is on Techcrunch: http://www.tech...ison_chart.html

By: Steven Roussey

Steven Roussey — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:22:20 +0000

Wow. Prospero has been around as long as we have, back even to our netbabbler days. Fascinating…

By: sd

sd — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:05:33 +0000

i am sorry, but can anyone tell me what is “white label social networking”? and I assume there are dark/black ones?

By: Tony Stubblebine

Tony Stubblebine — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:31:10 +0000

Congrats to Prospero. I’m sure it’s a good move for the founders.

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

By: Jackson

Jackson — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:15:26 +0000

Jeremiah, your list is missing another white label social networking company, HiveLive

By: Doug Mehus

Doug Mehus — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:38:56 +0000

I agree with Benjamin. Delphi Forums’ technology is so outdated it’s not even funny. Unless they plan on dramatically overhauling Delphi Forums’ technology to add new features and fix up many existing problems, I don’t see how this is a successful acquisition, other than it being made on the cheap (less than $30 million). They’ll likely have to spend much more than that to create a decent product.

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

By: Thad Martin

Thad Martin — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:28:52 +0000

My one argument with Jeremiah would be over the commoditization of the technology. I think when you look at the complexity involved in truly integrated community components with existing web presences to create a seamless experience for the user the blends the technology with the content – that technology is a long way out from truly being an in-a-box commodity. And though it may eventually become one, the expertise in creating and building a unique community destination will never become a commodity. Creating a successful, and sustainable community that fits strategically with a companies overall objectives – that kind of expertise is never going to be something you can get from a box.

By: Benjamin Parr

Benjamin Parr — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:18:00 +0000

If Delphiforums.com is a prime example of the worth and value of Prospero, then I don’t want to even think about how the hell Mzinga is going to leverage it. I swear those message boards have not changed since 1999. Any website that tells me to abort a flash script or suffer a site slowdown needs to be put out of its misery.

Perhaps Mzinga will be able to improve Prospero.

By: Michael CHin

Michael CHin — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:32:41 +0000

Couldn’t agree more with Jeremiah’s position on the value-added services, consultation, widgets, etc., especially at the current stage of maturity of this market.

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.

By: Nav

Nav — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:17:43 +0000

Congrats Prospero!

By: CelebritySurgery.net

CelebritySurgery.net — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:58:02 +0000

so many social networking sites coming out. sooner or later there will be too much and it’ll be passe.

http://CelebritySurgery.net

By: martha mihaly

martha mihaly — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:34:04 +0000

White label/generic flavours of social network sites – this really begins to speak to the lack of original thinking and bland flavour of most of the social networking sites.
It may be inevitable of course – as all of the platforms are working toward the same elusive goal of making some money by … well they haven’t figured that much out yet have they?
Of course for the purposes of reselling these platforms to corporations for their own commercial uses it is a brilliant business to be in. Certainly one where money will be made as the size of investments and growth of the company hint to.

By: Jeremiah Owyang

Jeremiah Owyang — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:25:26 +0000

Kulpeep

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-...king-platforms/

I cross linked at the bottom back to this post

By: Posties

Posties — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 12:39:51 +0000

@kuldeep, Software rebrand and meshed with an existing domain.

By: ViralKing

ViralKing — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:40:27 +0000

Wait for My Social Network to come out !

Over 1 yr in the making

By: kuldeep

kuldeep — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 09:12:04 +0000

forgive me for this dumb question, but can you tell me what is “White label” social networking?

By: Mircea

Mircea — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 08:31:43 +0000

——————
He also predicts that the character of these services will change in time, with a movement away from generic white label solutions and towards packages that address well-defined verticals such as sports or video.
——————

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…