Social Networking White Label Market Overcrowded, Reminiscent of CMS and Portal craze of Yesteryear
A friend of mine wanted a list of Social Media Applications that he could rebrand and use for his clients. I gave him a list of 7 or so on email, then decided to start a blog post on it. Within the hour, I had about 10.
I count over 30 White Label Social Networking Suites
Now, a few days later, the submissions have slowed down. Check out this list of 37 Social Networking Applications that one can download, or use a hosted version to rebrand.
Remember the CMS and Portal Craze?
This reminds me of the first web movement when everyone was crazy over CMS systems from late 90s to early 2000l, and then how everyone went crazy over portals (I myself worked on one at Exodus, called MyExodus, which even got awards). Now, many web managers have expressed their frustration with CMS systems never working, either they’re too complicated or inflexible. The portal strategy is dying, the new way is distributed content networks. I’m sure like all things, it will swing back over to centralized.
Google and Yahoo could play
I’m waiting to see if a company like Google can figure out how to white label such a tool, they already did it with Blogger, so why not take on a social networking tool. It would seem that Yahoo has a lot to gain, as they have one of the top viewed sites, tons of IDs and registered users, Yahoo Groups is antiquated and Yahoo 360 is irrelevant.
The Future
In the end only a few will matter. Some will get swallowed by large web or software companies, their features integrated or dismantled. There will be a some mergers and partnerships. Some will cease to matter, as they fall off the map. Others will evolve into something else. Will be interesting to see what happens.
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Building online community tools will always be much easier than actually building online communities.
In the end it will always be up to the community’s guardians, not the software, to make great things happen.
Yes! You’re are right. The hammer doesn’t make the house!
Cisco: Now it’s Tribe…
Is this the beginning of the inevitable consolidation that seems to be coming in the online community space?
First it was Five Apart, a community platform company. Yesterday Cisco announced it was buying Tribe. Thanks to Mukund for the heads up.
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[…] Just to give a hint at what is to come, check out Jermia Owang’s coments on the infrastructure field being overcrowded and his list of 37 white label services. […]
[…] comparison and the number of these services is pretty startling. Date: Mar 3rd, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · Tags: finance · web2.0 · social networks Who else iswriting about this? // // […]
[…] Update Feb 21st: Thanks for all the wonderful emails regarding this post. For anyone who’s asked for a recommendation, unfortunately, I’m not able to provide one. There’s a few reasons why I don’t recommend any of the above 1) I clearly don’t have the knowledge to review and experiment with all of them (about 40 listed now) 2) I would feel horrible if the project went wrong, and it was due to a product that I recommended. Thanks for understanding, I hope this list is a good start for you for you research. If you do have feedback, I hope you blog it, and then leave a comment below so others can hear about your experience. Update March 5th, 2007: The list continues to grow from email and comment submissions. There’s a few White Label Social Networking apps that are stealth although are apparently doing very well that are NOT even on this list. This market is very large, I wonder how long the demand will support it. Have you read my posts: Social Networking White Label Market Overcrowded, Reminiscent of CMS and Portal craze of Yesteryear and Listened to this podcast A VC’s thoughts on Social Networks? […]
Jeremiah, it seems that the lunch with Marc Canter from Broadbandmechanics (peopleaggregator) was relevant, considering what you have written in you update the 13th about openness. Keep up the good work, and keep the list updated. We would love to read posted reviews.
[…] I remember in the late 90s the push for many enterprise software companies to purchase Portal systems and then CMS systems. I predict this race for the feature war will start again, but this time, for social software features. […]
Michael, do you think the social software market is still full and won’t admit a user-focused contender?
Surely, if compared to the CMS market, there are only a few worthy, so do you think it’s only worth entering the social software market, if to aim at the best kind of software?
Or have the social media players settled with their choices between the providers? Are there social platform providers that dominate the market?
Thanks.
P.S. A “Comments via email” plugin wouldn’t hurt
Erm, Jeremiah, not Michael, sorry