Looks like WordPress is flexing its open source code base to good use …

BuddyPress - A Wordpress MU Based Social Network Platform - will transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform, something that represents more of a community building tool, or niche social network.

BuddyPress removes the main focus of WordPress MU away from blogs, moving it more towards the actual member themselves. A BuddyPress installation consists of a main community home page, which could either be an actual blog, or a syndication of all the activity of the community members.

BuddyPress contains all the features you’d expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact. The standard features of BuddyPress include: Extended Profiles,Personal Blog,Private Messaging, Friends, Groups, The Wire, Status Updates, and Albums. As each one is a separate plugin, admins can’t pick and choose which components they want and don’t want (or add new plugins).

The idea of an open source extensible social network solution has a lot of potential. I don’t think it would replace a Facebook or a MySpace service primarily because of scale. But it could be very applicable to groups or companies wanting to deploy their own social networking solution.

Editorial: Personally, I’m not sure why one of the big enterprise software companies has not done an open source social software offering. The basic features of social software are pretty boring so why try to sell those. The interesting bits are the multitude of directions the software can expand. And software companies are all about the 80% base not the 20% uniqueness. Plus, the meat and potatoes is the database and the application server and all that other IT gobbly gook. Open source the social software and sell scalable databases, storage, etc. At least that’s my take of things.

Anyway, with the combination of the very stable and tested WordPress codebase anchoring BuddyPress, I expect we’ll see a number of plugins developed to extend the feature set.

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Posted in IBM, Lotus Connections, Social Software, WordPress |

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