Content Matters

The NY Times has reported that Cisco will be acquiring the technology assets of nearly dormant social networking site Tribe.net.  You may recall that Tribe.net was one of the early players in the social networking arena.  Perhaps best known for the controversy when they banned sexually explicit content, Tribe had largely faded away, with the popularity of mainstream sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Cisco’s reported acquisition of Tribe, following its recent acquisition of social network tools provider Five Across, gives the Company an interesting set of capabilities.  The plan, as outlined in the Times, is for Cisco to leverage these tools to help their corporate clients develop and manage community sites for their users. 

Just as users are moving away from destination sites (as described in Fred Wilson’s deportalization post), the bet is that we will see similar changes in the social networking arena.  Destination sites like MySpace and YouTube may still be strong gathering places for teens, but corporations looking to communicate with clients will want to bring those capabilities into their own environments.

At first blush, the acquisitions seem odd for Cisco.  Other than their linguistic pairing, social networking and networking have little in common.  That being said, social networks can obviously drive quite a bit of Internet traffic and Cisco knows how to monetize the bits and bytes of traffic.  That said, the white label social networking environment is pretty crowded already, as Jeremiah Owyang points out.

It’s clear that social networking is making its way to the corporate world.  On Friday, Reuters announced its intention to build a “financial MySpace” for its Reuters Messaging clients.  Meanwhile, at the recent SIIA Information Industry Summit, Ben Edwards presented some of the ways that IBM has already been leveraging these technologies for both internal and external communications.

It will be interesting to see how Cisco plans to leverage these technologies.  For more on the acquisition, see posts from Rafat Ali, Mashable and TechCrunch.