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!

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.

Hear that? It’s the sound of servers in Switzerland sucking down information from social networking sites. Open-Xchange, an open-source e-mail and collaboration software maker, has set up a test Web site that allows people to pull in their contact information from various social networking services like LinkedIn and Facebook.

The Social networking sites view enables you to access a couple of social networking sites. There should be more such social networking websites in future releases, but for now, only two are supported.

One of the big changes in Ubuntu 10.4 (aka Lucid Lynx) is the built-in social networking tools. These include a menu bar option for posting updates directly to any number of social networking sites. This change has been introduced for the first time in the third alpha release, made last week.

Twitter is a social networking platform that keeps you in conversation by allowing you and your friends to follow each others' updates. The service lets users post and read 140-character updates, called tweets. With Twitter, you can do social networking on the fly, from your mobile phone or at your desktop, from a Web browser or a Twitter client.

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.

"An open and distributed model gives users and organizations a chance to choose their social networking platform without sacrificing their connections to friends, family, business partners and colleagues. Control of the data would be an obviously important decision factor for many people."

Today I discovered that Red Hat Linux has created a new social networking site call Mugshot. This site is promoted as an “open source” site. I checked the site FAQ to find out that all the software powering Mugshot is, in fact, open source. And indeed it is.