Social Networking Evolution - 3 New trends

The "Social Networking" phenomenon, dominated recently by MySpace and Facebook, is rapidly mutating.  This past week alone has seen some major maturation/advances, and the emergence of three trends detailed below.  I've personally felt that brand based social networks had the potential to be enormous sucking wastes of time and effort, but I am now a convert - a brand (or many of them) will get it right in '07 - but I believe their success will be based on how willing they are to creating a brand-based social network that's open, flexible and interoperable with existing network (and new ones coming online).

Three new trends seem likely:

1. Companies and Media Take Control of Their Social Networks

• Last week, Cisco acquired Tribe, so it now has the capability to help its corporate clients develop their own social networks.  Tribe.net hasn't had a lot of success, but got some notoriety by being the social network for "Burning Man" festival attendees.  Cisco may now be able to offer its corporate clients the ability to build social/collaborative internal networks.
• USA Today re-designs its site and adds a social network

2. Vertical Business-to-Business Opportunities Emerge

• Reuters announced the launch a financially focused social network for analysts and traders.

3. Social Networks Splinter into The Long Tail

• Finally, the latest incarnation of Ning emerged.The site allows people to create their own social networks based around any topic they desire.  1198 complete networks were made in the last week, and I launched one for my family in about 10 minutes last night to test this thing out...
  

as influx put it,

"The social network has just graduated; its just been uncoupled from its ties with the brands that developed the idea, so we should now expect to see it form a component of many of our experiences on the internet."

This gets real interesting with Ning, and I'll pop them in another entry.