Cisco Systems Acquires Social Networking Technologies

Posted on March 6, 2007

The New York Times recently reports that Cisco Systems, Inc. has acquired technology assets from Utah Street Networks, the makers of Tribe.net, one of the earliest social networks. Cisco also recently acquired Five Across, which offers a platform for building social networking communities.

It is a curious pairing. Cisco, with 55,000 employees, makes networking equipment for telecommunications providers and other big companies. Tribe.net, run by a company with eight employees, has been trampled by newer social sites like MySpace and Facebook.
But along with the recent purchase of a social network design firm, Five Across, the deal will give Cisco the technology to help large corporate clients create services resembling MySpace or YouTube to bring their customers together online. And that ambition highlights a significant shift in the way companies and entrepreneurs are thinking about social networks.
They look at MySpace and Facebook, with their tens of millions of users, as walled-off destinations, similar to first-generation online services like America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy. These big Web sites attract masses of people who have dissimilar interests and, ultimately, little in common.

Some bloggers are puzzled as to why the router making firm Cisco would want to enter the software social networking business. It would be even more puzzling if Cisco really wanted a goofy social network like Tribe but it turns out they do not. What Cisco really wants are the people who can make sites like Tribe and the technology behind it.

Utah Street Networks was founded in 2003 and has seven employees based in San Francisco, Calif. The Utah Street Networks technology and certain members of team will join CMSG led by Dan Scheinman, Senior Vice President and General Manager. The deal does not include the Tribe.net site, which will remain completely independent of Cisco.

Cisco does have lots of big corporate clients they could sell social networking intranets to. Cruft blogs about how the Cisco social networking plan could work inside the Corporsphere.