Wikia has announced they are allowing their social networking platform to become open source. This will allow anyone to easily create a social community complete with profiles, avatars, friending, etc. ... within their MediaWiki-based wiki sites.

"Mozilla has released details on The Coop, a new product that will incorporate social networking features directly into the Firefox browser. This is not good news for the privately-backed social browser Flock (also built on Mozilla), which is yet to release a 1.0 version of its browser.

The popular social networking site Facebook just announced a Chinese version, but similar Chinese-based Web sites such as Xiaonei and Hainei have been struggling there. However, since April, UCenter Home, an open source social network service based on PHP and MySQL, is pushing open social networking in China.

OpenID is well on the way to being the defacto standard for identifying yourself across the Internet. With that settled, people are really starting to look hard at the next things we can do now that we know who everyone is. My favorite one (and one of the main reasons I got into this OpenID stuff) is portable social networking.

One of the biggest complaints a Firefox evangelist encounters is "it doesn't act or feel like browser X." Internet Explorer users complain that Firefox doesn't look like what they're used to. Opera, Safari, and Netscape users complain that it's missing many of their favorite features. And the social networking gurus point to the powerful social networking features Flock boasts and Firefox lacks.

Veteran tech entrepreneur Bob Bickel has let out a whisper of his new venture, Ringside Networks, which will aim to make social networking applications work outside the network.

It may be almost a year late, but Flock, the browser dedicated to social networking, has finally released version 1.0. The results are surprisingly compelling.

"On Friday 2nd November I attended the London FSFE event, Free Software as a Social Innovation. I am not really a techie (though I have been Free since 1998) and certainly not in an NGO, but had asked to go because I wanted to see some ground level advocacy in action.

I had an interesting day. Feel "Free" to read on..."

Google's OpenSocial initiative to establish common, standard APIs for creating social-networking applications is still in its early days. But its impact for end users, developers, Web site owners, social-network operators and even business application vendors could be huge in the long run.