Social Go is a company that lets you roll your own social network, much like Ning (see our previous discussions of Ning). I also consider myself to be in the business of creating niche communities, so these companies are competitors in a way (but I don't really view them that way, as I don't think much about competition, save for how it might be affecting larger trends and what APIs they may have that I can integrate into my web sites).

I've become increasingly skeptical of companies like SocialGo, primarily because the vast majority of these niche social networking companies are infrastructure players -- meaning they focus on hiring networking people, and minimizing bandwidth costs. Basically, the seek to amortize their infrastructure costs across all the niche social networks they host.

This is great, although I think the real opportunity is in knowing how to build the right community site for the customer. Most people cannot do this, even if you create a slick interface that makes it easy for them to build the site they want. The reason is that building a community requires more than just web knowledge; rather it requires cultural knowledge, like how to create the proper videos, how to deal with community members, what type of moderation policy you should have, how to leverage crowdsourcing, etc.

To their credit, SocialGo, has rolled out a concierge service in which they build a custom social network for you (rather than just giving you the tools to do so on your own), which I think is a great idea. I'm probably going to borrow some elements from their sales pitch, because I was wondering how best to create the right sales pitch for this type of service myself.

But in my opinion this introduces another problem for SocialGo, which is the same problem I think a lot of businesses you hear about on TechCrunch have: they are in too many different types of businesses. They make social networking applications, so they are a product development company. They customize things for customers, so they are a customer relations business. And they host all the technology, so they are an infrastructure business.

The challenge for Internet startups in today's environment, as we've discussed before, is to unbundle: instead of being an infrastructure company, and a product creation company, and a customer relations company, you should be one of those. Then try to establish partnerships with other companies to handle the other needs you may have.

Certainly, the path that I am talking about is more challenging, and is one in which you will not be able to buy your success, but rather will have to earn it by creating new processes and cultivating new efficiencies. Of course, this is precisely the stuff that great, game-changing disruptive innovations are made out of.

Because this post is in a way about the importance of focus/specialization for today's Internet startups, the song for the post is "Specialization" by Marilyn Monroe.