In reading a great piece on the future of social networking in today's NYTimes (via Pete Cashmore's great Mashable blog), I learned that Cisco has been snapping up "social networking" assets— a move that is being universally ridiculed in the blogosphere because Cisco is only apparently supposed to know about routers and switches.

This is indeed a bogus move but not because "social networking" is a perfect example of a feature and not a product. After all, Cisco is the king of buying features and making products out of them. The real elephant in the room on this one is that there is absolutely zero business model overlap here— and this is what will ultimately lead whatever assets they acquire to get marginalized, ignored, and finally written off as a hangover during that crazy "Web 2.0 bubble."

So far as I can tell, the only business model that works with social network sites, once they are at scale, is an ad-based media model (this of course begs the question of why you'd buy a social network site that is not at scale if you don't have the tools to bring it to scale). And I may be wrong here— but I'm not sure that I've ever seen Cisco's ad salesforce pounding the pavement on Madison avenue.

I remember that people laughed when Cisco bought Linksys and commented that the company didn't know the first thing about marketing and selling consumer networking equipment. But at least in that case, the business models (sell chips with RJ-45 ports, make money) was pretty complementary. In this case, I'm afraid of what the ultimate fate of these social networking folks is going to be 12 months from now. Unless of course, then can get good at writing router firmware.