Social Networking Goes Corporate

One of the advantages about learning about social networking websites and getting the grasp of how they work and how to manipulate them is that you will be prepared for the future.

Cisco has acquired the rights to Tribe.net, a social networking website that has fallen by the wayside as other companies have continued to grow. The purchase of Tribe is Cisco’s first step in acquiring the technology to have companies set up their own social networking websites, be it internally or for public use.

The NY Times covered this purchase and examined the growth of the corporate social networking, in this article. Companies from the Portland Traiblazers to Nike to the Presidental Campaign of Barack Obama, have all established their own versions of social networking websites. This is a trend that people believe is going to grow, with giants such as IBM and Cisco designing software to provide to their clients. Facebook and Friendster already have begun to move towards offering their source code to corporate purchasers.

Is this going to become overkill? Is there going to be a niche site everywhere? Is every company going to move towards this? It is really hard to say how long this trend is going to last or where it is going to move to. Eventually I think it will be overkill, unless someone finds a way to tie them all together. An application that will remember all your log ins, consolidate your messaging services, and updates everything on a single dashboard.

Wait a second maybe I should patent that.

Technorati Tags: social networking, corporate, cisco, tribe.net