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Cisco Purchases Tribe.net

Next week the technology giant Cisco intends to announce one of its less more unusual deal ? It is purchasing the technological assets of Tribe.net, a forgotten social networking website, by some accounts. This is a strange coupling. Cisco and its 50 thousand employees, provide networking equipment to telecom providers and other big companies. Tribe.net and its 8 employees are being trampled by other social networking websites like My-Space and FaceBook. And yet, together with the purchase of Five Across, which it completed lately, the purchase of Tribe.net will give Cisco the technology to help big companies build social networks like YouTube and MySpace for their customers, Seeing MySpace and FaceBook and their tens of millions of user as new internet attractions.

Marc Andreessen, of former Netscape fame, has also reentered the social networking scene, with his recent relaunch of Ning, a social network website running standard PHP with a Java platform. Ning is unique in that anyone can make a full copy of the types of social websites and social networks that are popular today and customize them for a particular topic or need, catering to specific audiences. Today Ning allows users to copy anyone of its social networking websites, a group website, a photos website, and a videos website for any purpose. These websites feature a "View Source" tool, allowing users to program there social networking website to fit there needs. Ning is, currently, entirely free. According to Ning`s FAQ, they don`t intend to change this policy.

My Space, headquartered in Santa Monica, California, is currently the largest social networking website. It offers an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos. According to Alexa Internet, it is currently the world`s sixth most popular website.