Tribe is not a successful company, and I imagine the net cost to Cisco of acquiring Tribe is quite low.
Here is why I think Cisco bought Tribe: imagine if your Linksys wireless router came equipped w/ software to let you find, join, participate and/or create social networks -- from your family to your peer network to a variety of workgroups. If we assume that these kinds of networks will be as ubiquitous as websites themselves, Cisco has created a platform to differentiate Linksys in the home networking space and to drive overall traffic.
What's the "traffic" potential. Yesterday, I heard a speaker say that YouTube today has more traffic than the entire Web in 2001. Starts to make the tribe deal seem sensible?
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