Diller Acquires ZeroDegrees - Social Networking Feeding Frenzy Begins

from the let-the-acquisitions-begin... dept

With over a hundred different social and business networking companies shoving each other aside to try to get some publicity (and come up with a business model), it's become clear that - for most of them - the only hope of ever making any money is to simply sell out to another company. It looks like that process is now starting, as Barry Diller's InterActive Corp has bought ZeroDegrees, one of the social networking companies that focused more on business uses. It's not entirely clear what InterActive will do with them, and if they'll keep them as a standalone site. As with most of these services, it probably makes more sense to build the technology into something else. In the meantime, however, with Diller's marketing muscle, expect to start receiving yet another series of "join my network" emails from yet another business networking service you simply don't need. At the same time, this deal means that we should expect to hear of other, more established, companies buying up the various leftover social networking sites, though who knows if any of them will ever actually be useful.