Late last week I had the chance to participate in a call with Bob Bickel and Rich Friedman of Ringside Networks who talked us through their plans for the new open source social networking technology vendor.

Ringside Networks was a very cool company - one of the best new open-source companies, as I wrote earlier this year. The company had a dream similar to Ning's - to make social networking-type applications an integral part of a wide array of websites and enterprises.

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!

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.

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.

Open Source CMSes are the latest rage it seems, and we've tried out dozens. One that stands out above the rest for small businesses and personal networks is the Elgg open source "social engine," which can be used to create social applications.

"Ever since Richard Stallman started the free software movement, the core ideal of it has been built around the concept of a community. A network of people working and playing together for their common good. In the last couple of years computer science research have found a new hot-tech in the user-interaction space: social networking..."

By installing and running firesheep, anyone can "sniff out" the unencrypted HTTP sessions currently allowing users on that network segment to access social networks, online services and other website requiring a login, and simply hijack them and impersonate the user.