Open Source Social Networks

Compared to other applications of the open source model, it's only been relatively recently that open source developers have had a go at creating social networking schemes. So, while there's no centralized, standard open source social software (or for that matter, open standards) quite yet, there are innumerable choices. Not all of them are mature, and not all of them have an immense user base, but becoming one of those users and providing critical input is arguably the most important thing needed to get these projects into the mainstream as Firefox and other open source projects have already.

However, by calling open source and social networking platforms immature doesn't quite do what's currently out there justice. How many matchmaker sites have been built off of Dolphin? How many Wordpress blogs have spawned their own social networks because of BuddyPress? You may already be using fully fledged social platforms built using open source software and not even realize it!

Twitter definitely has the microblogging market cornered. But does it have to? It's proven to be vulnerable to denial of service attacks and nonprofitable to boot, but microblogging quite obviously plays a critical role in the flow of information. Nor does Twitter use any open microblogging standards, making it harshly incompatible with other services.

Along comes along Identi.ca. This is the latest—and hottest—effort to create an open source alternative to Twitter. Identi.ca is built on the shoulders of previous efforts like Laconi.ca (now StatusNet) and others, and includes more features than Twitter currently has, including image uploading and OpenID compatibility. It's some serious competition, growing by upwards of a thousand users a day. This software may also be used to create private Twitteresque networks for businesses.

Of course, there are numerous other open source microblogging efforts, including Google's Jaiku and the aptly named OpenMicroBlogger. None of them have had quite the impact of Identi.ca, however. At least, not yet.

That's right, Facebook has open source roots. It was entirely developed using open source tools, and now it gives right on back to the open source community.

Facebook is also released (in somewhat limited capacity) as an open source piece of software. Specifically, it has released a Facebook Open Platform under a CPAL license. This allows people to freely make variants on Facebook for their own ends, though you still need to give credit as to the source of your code.

Facebook also has a variety of other open source projects, from the iPhoto exporter to a PHP embedder and even a public mirror for other open source projects everywhere from Firefox to Fedora.

So while, no, Facebook is not completely open source, it has significant ties to the open source community. For more information, check out the Facebook Open Source page.

While not strictly a social networking tool, Wordpress may be easily adapted to a full fledged social networking platform with additions like BuddyPress. Even without such additions, Wordpress forms an interactive environment where users may explore other people's blogs (or ignore them) to whatever extent that they would like. Wordpress thus blurs the line between CMS (content management system) and social software, and in both respects is fully open source.

Again, there are many, many social networks out there that utilize open source social networking platforms. If you're looking for something open source for the sake of open source, just check out any old social networking site and see if it's been built with open source tools. Being open source is not necessarily every website's main advertising point.

As this is a new and constantly changing field of open source development, keep in mind that the field might rapidly change even within the space of a few months. Don't like what's out there now? Wait a while and see what a little time does for the movement.