Cisco’s social network acquisitions (Was Sunday Tribune: “Social networking: sharing is caring for the bottom line”)

I was quoted for this article in the Sunday Tribune by Damien about our boards.ie CI (commercial interaction) forums. There are other interesting parts to the article, in particular Cisco’s move into the social networking domain earlier this month. When I wrote earlier about Cisco’s “Human Network” ad, I hadn’t realised that Cisco had actually purchased Tribe.net (and Five Across), thinking that they were content to simply have us use their networking infrastructure for whatever collaborative purposes we enjoyed. But despite much bewilderment, there seems to be some good reasons for this acquisition (see Marc Canter’s list and Winer’s tongue-in-cheek take on the move). (From the Semantic Web side, maybe Cisco could be persuaded to provide further convergence via OpenID, Tribe’s FOAF provisions and something similar from Five Across’ “Connect” product.)