ITNews.com.au — Will Cisco social media deals impact enterprise?

Andrew Conry-Murray — 9 March 2007
Cisco Systems sealed a deal this week to purchase software assets from, and acquire employees of, social-networking site operator Utah Street Networks. The networking equipment giant also finalized its acquisition Five Across, originally announced in February. Five Across makes social-networking and forum software to help companies improve communications with customers.

Cisco said it would incorporate Utah Street Networks, which operates the locally focused social-networking site Tribe.net, into its Cisco Media Solutions Group (CMSG). That group was started in December 2006 to create and promote infrastructure products for consumer content providers. Cisco said, however, that it would not integrate Tribe.net site itself. It provided no financial details for the Utah Street Networks transaction.

Cisco’s Media Solutions Group describes itself as providing “an infrastructure platform designed to help media-content owners enhance the content and entertainment experience for consumers”. I can see a role for community-building software in there but the present Cisco offering is down among the plumbing. Presumably the new pieces of software (and the 15 or so new employees that came with them) will create community tools that Cisco’s customers can offer their customers.

At one time, the top man at Tribe.net was best buddies with the owners of two other popular networking sites, LinkedIn and Friendster. Perhaps the latter two are waiting their turn to be snapped up by a giant corporation. (Some companies have that as their ambition from the first. This has always struck me as a cold-blooded approach to building a business and suggestive of little love of what they’re doing.)

Social networking on the Internet started attracting close attention from venture capitalists in 2004. There was, unsurprisingly, little new about the idea or its implementation. It goes back to the days of The WELL, of CompuServe, of Usenet and of bulletin board systems, all of which predate the World Wide Web. This oft-cited 1994 college thesis from David Belson elaborated upon themes in a 1978 book — The Network Nation — and found them relevant then. They still are.

One point of difference emerges, though. The thesis and the book are, to a great extent, about collaboration. Collaboration software (aka groupware) is about creating, often jointly, new information for sharing among a group. Social networking software, 21st millennium style, is mainly about individuals sharing existing information, often about themselves. The former is about making molecules; the latter is about atoms interacting.

Naturally, matters are not that black and white. (Both pieces of software that Cisco has bought are about about networking and collaboration, for example.) Communities can and do develop on social networking sites, whereas some ostensibly collective systems remain stubbornly individualistic. In these, members lob information parcels over the fence at one another but seldom engage in shared thinking.

To some extent, the technology involved is irrelevant. Decades ago, unofficial groups typically communicated by circulating photocopies of interesting articles though the internal post, with the occasional note appended.

The real difference is whether a group persona emerges. It’s a self-fulfilling definition. If people think of themselves as part of a group, they will behave as though they are, thus creating one. Some self-created groups last for decades, others for days or weeks. All are valid.