When hardware vendors try to do embrace a phenomenon like DotCom, Linux, Web2.0 or somesuch, takeover press releases like this generally result:-

Cisco

SAN JOSE, Calif., February 9, 2007 – Cisco Systems, Inc., (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Five Across, Inc. of San Francisco, Calif., a leading vendor in the social networking marketplace.

The Five Across platform, Connect Community Builder, empowers companies to easily augment their websites with full-featured communities and user-generated content such as audio/video/photo sharing, blogs, podcasts, and profiles. These user-interaction functions help companies improve the interaction with their customers and overall customer experience on their websites. Social networking functions are of unique interest to media companies, sports leagues, affinity groups and any organization wishing to increase its interaction with its online constituency.

“Cisco believes the network is the platform for organizations to connect with their constituents and for individuals to connect with each other,” said Dan Scheinman, senior vice president and general manager of the Cisco Media Solutions Group (CMSG). “With the acquisition of Five Across, Cisco is taking an important step towards helping its customers evolve their website experience into something more relevant and valuable to the end-user.”

(Via)

It doesn’t get much better when you drill into the product verbiage:-

Enterprise-class platform for social networking and online communities

Five Across is committed to the long-term success of your online community and your business. The Five Across Connect 1.8 Community Builder platform is the foundation of our solution and leverages our expertise and relationships to help you build a high impact, high traffic, high participation community. The Connect 1.8 Community Builder platform addresses the critical needs of high traffic websites looking to promote and monetize user-generated content in order to expand the online experience of their community members. Based on enterprise-class technology, Connect 1.8 delivers the scalability, reliability and performance required by large scale commercial usage.

My first reaction when reading this stuff – well, not my first reaction, ‘coz that was “I really must form a company called Seven Sideways so I can guaranteed to be bought-out overnight” – so my second reaction can largely be summed up as “barf.”

“Website experience”? And who is this “end-user” who – magically transmogrifies into a “community participant” somewhere between the press release and the white paper?

There’s always an attractive proposition in offering what my dear colleagues and I would hopefully term “decent shit which is easy to use, scales well and doesn’t crash”, but any company which kicks off a Web2.0 product pitch with the notion of “building” a “high participation” community through mere provision of technology is one which is deluding its potential customer base – (cf: “Men! Using Lynx deodourant will cause women to spontaneously get naked and chase you along the beach…”) – or perhaps the vendors just don’t understand the actual needs of their potential customers?

Stuff like help? Advice? Experience? You know, sell solutions rather than parachuting a hardware or software box into the customer site, leaving the technical Maquis at the customer without a clue what to do with the new weapons of change?

One colleague recently attended a Cisco training week and accreditation course, and although he’s worked with their kit for years was still gobsmacked at the “from soup to nuts” approach of the Cisco product set. They’re a one-stop shop where the harried IT or Network Manager can purchase prettymuch everything needed to re-outfit a datecentre – not necessarily the most efficient or powerful solutions, but nobody every got fired no brains are required for buying Cisco.

My question regards community building is do they get it? – and although I find some of the Five Aside software stack features appealing:

• Video and Audio transcoding allows users to upload and share their own content
• RSS enables syndication of any file type
• AJAX tools allow for online edits through the browser
• Dynamic page loading eliminates the lag time associated with real-time access
• Ratings system can be utilized with all content types including profiles
• Keyword linking and tagging categorizes profiles and other content for easy search
• Automatic generation of multiple list types based on recent edits, rankings and page views
• Dynamic ad inclusion for flexible integration of ads on user pages

(OK, except the last one, I hate the last one) – aside from some of the apparent niftyness of the toys, I cannot help but feel that the answer is “no”; that in the lumbering hands of Cisco’s salesforce the world is about to be populated by yet more ghost communities (“curmunities?”) each populated by a handful of product purchasers who never check whether anyone ever followed up their solitary, lonely posting.