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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Media 2.0, Web Industry, Web Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.