TACOMA DAILY INDEX — Oct 28 — The social networking space is getting crowded with sites like RYZE.com, LinkedIn.com, SixDegrees.com, MeetUp.com, Friendster.com, Tickle.com, Tribe.com and even one called DudeCheckThisOut.com. Technology analyst Mitch Ratcliffe has studied social networks extensively. He writes about Internet trends and politics on his Web log at RatcliffeBlog.com. "I was on the Board of Directors for Match.com. For the first couple of years, you have actually no idea what is going to work. You don't know how often people are going to come back…It turns out they would come back generally three or four times before they <cease coming> back for one reason or the other. There's a lot of experimentation amongst all these companies to see how much people use <social networking sites>, what the size of the typical network grows to, and whether there is enough interaction between those networks to drive a real business model. I don't know if any one of these sites will be able to compete without buying and consolidating all the other network services. Most of the companies that are involved in this are going to have to do something that is open source, that allows people to share this information across networks, or no one of them are going to become a viable place for people to stay…Consolidation is already starting to go on at the very genetic level between all these sites. Information is shared through protocols like "friend of a friend," which is a standardized way of expressing information about the relationships between users on a site and OPML, which is a feed that allows you to track what other people are reading — a sort of logging of blogging. They are all going to compete to be the place that is the aggregator of choice."
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Mark Brooks: Well, Google certainly has the resources to gobble up more than a few players, but is the revenue potential there to justify it?
