24 October 2006

Further consolidation in social software for professionals?

The first segment within the social software sphere that seems to be reaching a state of consolidation is professional networking. Further consolidation seems probable.

Today, after 8 years of operating, Ecademy (a.k.a. the English Viaduc) has reached the 100,000 members mark. Not a probable candidate to win it all.
Viaduc (a.k.a. the French LinkedIN), having 680,000 members, today informed me that it will soon present itself in 6 languages, under the new name Viadeo. It's working together (whatever that may mean prctically) with Chinese Tianji. It doesn't seem to come natural to them.
LinkedIN (a.k.a. the American openBC), with 7,5 million members, today announced that it's going German. Interesting player.
Which leaves us OpenBC (a.k.a. Xing), with well over 1.5 million members, that has been successfully polyglot and cross cultural since mid 2004, and has been the only one that has blended and enhanced real world networking with a digital community solution...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for your post Bob!

It looks like being successful in Germany is critical for the leading social networks!

http://www.visible-networking.com/2006/10/net_linkedin_an.html

 
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