"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.

Social media and social networking are huge now-a-days, with Twitter, Facebook and the like being hugely successful at keeping friends and family in touch. Now only that, but social networks are huge for charities, with many causes being supported and heavily promoted via social networking.

Like many multinational corporations, Microsoft has embraced social networking as a means of making customers feel like participants, not just end users, in a Microsoft community.  When it comes to community-building, however, Microsoft is fighting an uphill battle against the open-source world, which was built around social networking before it was called 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.

Modular social networking gadget specifications now allow use beyond pure social networking applications, offering both a core and social set of data models, APIs and gadgets

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.

Elgg is an open source application for rolling out a social network. It installs like any Web-based software, but instead of a blog or a wiki, it gives you all the components of a social networking site -- your own MySpace!

Social media addict or social media newbie? Either way, we’ve got four must-have Firefox extensions that will make using popular social media sites much easier and more seamless within the world’s most popular open source browser.

"Today at Wikia we have released our social networking features for MediaWiki under the GNU GPL 2.0. [...] I think the whole wiki/free culture space is about to get a whole lot more interesting."