Terrence Russell
Business

Cisco Hazy On Its Social Networking Future

When I’d heard about Cisco’s aquisition of Utah Street Networks and Five Across it seemed like a pretty safe bet that they were going to throw their hat into the social networking ring. After all, Utah Street Networks owned the social networking tech behind tribe.net and Five Across had earned its stripes by developing a […]

Cisco

When I'd heard about Cisco's aquisition of Utah Street Networks and Five Across it seemed like a pretty safe bet that they were going to throw their hat into the social networking ring. After all, Utah Street Networks owned the social networking tech behind tribe.net and Five Across had earned its stripes by developing a decent social networking platform for NHL.com. But after Cisco's Chief Development Officer Charlie Giancarlo spoke to Reuters yesterday, I'm not sure what to believe:

"There are a set of capabilities we're working on we believe will help enable social networking and help information find people rather than people find information. . .We are not going to become a retail social networking site. . .meaning directly dealing with consumers on the Internet."

I'd like to think that Giancarlo disappeared in a puff of smoke after this statement, but I'm sure he just slinked away.

With the B2B video-conferencing gurus at WebEx Communications about to join Cisco's fold, and Giancarlo's denial of a customer-facing retail venture it's looking like we're in for more TelePresence apps. The visuals of TelePresence with the productivity suite of something like Microsoft's LiveMeeting would be a great move for the already lagging Cisco, but we're not sure that outcome can be achieved with the sum of its recently aquired parts. Regardless of what they're working on out in the valley, we know one thing is for certain: No CiscoSpace.

Cisco Developing Social Networking Tools