I wonder how much it would cost to buy Tribe.net ?

If I was a magic money fairy - as opposed to an impoverished programmer - I'd try to find a way to merge Tribe with Behance and DesignOutpost

Behance has a great look and a nice angle of being not only a LinkedIn style directory, but also a kind Getting Things Done consultant, for the "Creative Class".

But it gives little sense of a community or real artistic "scene".

OTOH, Tribe has that in spades. Tribe used to be a fantastic place to have good discussions ... as it has lost attention to the other YASNS, the debates have died out a bit, sadly. But there's no doubt that members feel they're part of something ... a bohemian, creative, tolerant, underground, burner, new age, spiritual, sexually experimental movement.

DesignOutpost is a market for hiring creative people (graphic and sound-designers, web developers etc.) to work in a radically open way. Yet, its profiles are far behind those of Behance or Tribe.

In the talk of consolidation of the YASNS (particularly the dance of M$ and Yahoo, Facebook and MySpace) the motive is simply the lumpen aggregation of eyeballs for advertisers.

But the real as-yet-unlocked value of YASNS is to enable groups to *do* things together. Markets from DesignOutpost to Etsy to Rentacoder are providing one way for people to work together. The interesting thing about my fantasy merger is not the aggregation of eyeballs but the real (am I really, gonna use this word? OMFG! guess I am, take cover) synergy of the activities or communities.

A real social network and creative community which was also a good portfolio manager AND market could create value in a way unimagined by the advertising model of YASNS.

Update 2011 : Some more thoughts on YASN monetization.

Ning faces the same issues as Tribe

Google leading a consortium of YASNS for a common application API is, of course, a fantastic idea.

I can run my app. on Ning, Orkut (which, if you live in this part of the world is a big deal), SalesForce (!!!) and LinkedIn? I am there, baby! (Or at least, just as soon as my FB application is done, I'll be porting it there. ;-)

Will it work to overthrow Facebook? Who knows?

One question is, what resources of access to the users the API will offer developers? This is where the cultural component of the YASNS becomes tricky.

The "killer" part of the YASN-as-platform is what it lets you do with people. And that varies with the culture and privacy policies of the YASN.

The crucial test here will be not "do these networks all provide the same API call to place a chunk of HTML on the user's home-page?". That's pretty boring and not what YASNS-as-platforms are about. (Aside : in fact, a good high-level language ought to be able to abstract away from those differences. ;-)

No, the crucial test is "will their query language (equivalent to Facebook's FQL) allow the same kind of searches to be done on the social network?"

The paradox is, that if the answer to that question is "yes" then all these social networks have just turned themselves into commodity web-hosting. In fact, it's worse than that. They'll neither be able to compete with each other on applications - everyone will have the same - nor on what I call "link-management" (ie. relationship-management) - because that's exactly what a common query language will standardize. So the only thing they have left to differentiate themselves is ownership of your social-network data.

Listen up : if the "common API" includes a common query language and set of relation-types and query permissions, then this is a big incentive for the YASNS to more jealously try to defend their "ownership" of your social network and will disincentivate them from sharing it or allowing "cross-network queries".

However, I don't expect that that's what's going to happen. YASNS-as-platforms have got to realize that they are offering a platform for relationship-management and they'll try to compete by offering different link-management features. So on LinkedIn you'll be able to filter and segment and query your social-network by different criteria from those available on Orkut. And the kind of things you can do with relationships will be the reason you choose LinkedIn rather than Orkut (or vice-versa).

And, if I'm right, and YASNS do see that their strategy is competing on link-management services, then any common query language defined within the consortium is necessarily a lowest-common denominator. And developers will be focused on taking advantage of the more comprehensive and sophisticated relationship management facilities which are only available on a particular YASN. So in practice the number of really interesting widgets and applications which can run across the different YASNS is going to be trivial.

ps : shame I didn't see Tribe on the list of consortium members. That could at least keep them in the game if these applications run on it.

Interesting interview with one of the founders of Facebook. Sensible points : continuing to look at Facebook as a platform and as as tool to enrich existing social relationships rather than create new ones (that makes it more like LinkedIn than Tribe)

Hmmm. Social Networking news ...

Cisco buying Tribe's tech. People are confused.

Meanwhile Ning seems to have decided to reinvent itself as ... erm ... Tribe : a generic build-your-own-social-network site.

Me, I'm confused too. And more than that, I'm disappointed by the Ning change. Taking a quick look at the site, it seems to have utterly disowned the previous "social development environment" incarnation of Ning, handing over that mantle to Yahoo Pipes.

OK, I half understand : maybe the business model wasn't working. Not everyone is, or wants to be, a programmer, and Ning didn't get the kind of traction of a MySpace or YouTube. Nor was it likely to.

Faced with that predicament, my suggestion to Ning might have been to pitch it as a white-label development tool for third-party resellers : small agencies who are creating web-sites or intranets for other companies. Or maybe something to do work on enterprise intranets. However they clearly wanted something else.

Now what we've got looks suspiciously like Tribe given a makeover by 37 Signals.

Which is mysterious. I'm a member of Tribe, and I like it very much. But it's widely considered to be a "failure" in the YASN market. What makes Ning think that the business model is viable? Or that they can make it work?

One thing that occurs to me, maybe this is really the old Ning in disguise. Perhaps a lot of social development stuff is there behind the scenes, and this is simply wrapping it in something that looks more familiar to the general public. That would make some sense, use "make your own tribe" to draw in people who wouldn't have dared go near the old Ning, but then just happen to have a bunch of Ning-apps. sitting around which can be add to these networks. And which the more curious users could learn to customize and share.

However, having gone to play around a bit, that doesn't seem to be the case with the new Ning. Contrariwise, it looks like history has been ruthlessly rewritten; Ning was allegedly founded in October 2004 to give everyone the opportunity to create social networks. The old Ning was full of "HotOrNot" style comparison games and mashups with Google Maps. But while the new Ning allows you to add discussion forums, photos and videos to your tribe social network, hotornots and mashups are conspicuously absent.

Maybe the developers' docs will cast more light on things. You can still program stuff, but there's no hint of users sharing their code with each other, which was the really interesting part of the old system.

So why does Cisco want Tribe's code? Beats me. Speculating wildly, maybe there's something to do with convergence in the home between television, internet, entertainment etc. And maybe the next step beyond BitTorrent peer-sharing and You Tube is some kind of private P2P video sharing within social networks, so that tribes become an organizing principle for video, rivaling television channels.

But that's speculating wildly ...

Anyway. I'm a member of several YASNs but only two mean anything to me : Tribe and Linked-In. I joined Linked-In years ago, and pretty much forgot about it. It's a pretty inert sort of service. I wouldn't think about it or visit the site at all except that people I know keep joining it and linking to me. I've started to come to the conclusion that there's something rather interesting about this extremely slow social network. Most importantly, it's all about the world outside the web and outside web-time. You don't go there, don't do anything with it. But slowly and surely the network keeps accreting more ex-colleagues at the glacial pace of 4 or 5 a year.

That's all it does. But it's more succesful at that than anything else. I tried to recruit my IRL friends to Tribe. But only a couple of the more web-oriented ones bothered to join. Yet people who have no time or inclination to be on the web keep turning up on Linked-In. Whereas Tribe is great for meeting new people and having valuable conversations, Linked-In turns out to be great for reconnecting and tracking "old" people. I guess it's the combination of seriousness and undemandingness; people join it who have no time for web-culture and who are scared to become involved in the more active YASNs.