I was talking to my friend Yitz the other day (whose assbook has taken on a post-Scav life of its own1) about the possibilities of Open Source social networking software.
In some sense, Open Source social networking software is meaningless, because social networks derive value from their members more than from the underlying software. Slashdot and Livejournal are both built on open source software, but the sites and their respective communities (I would argue), have made greater impact than the software themselves.
However, as people begin to realize that just about any software created these days, particularly for the web, has to be social networking software of one form or another, an Open Source social networking library that provides core functionality could become valuable. Yitz created a site that does most of what The Facebook does (and some things that it doesn't do) in about a week, but most people don't have the time, energy or brains to do that. Even if they did, it's a royal waste of time to recreate 90% of the{face|ass}book just to do something a little different for the remaining 10%.
One application we discussed was the marriage between OpenHive, and a social networking core. At this point, the assbook has more extensive social networking capabilities than OpenHive, and it makes sense to take those core SN capabilities and simply add library sharing features on top of it.
Another interesting possibility would be if the OSSN library had externally accessible APIs, that allowed different social networks built using the same core to communicate with each other; effectively building a grid of social networks (or a network of networks). So, for example, if you have an account on The Assbook, you wouldn't have to re-register for OpenHive or rebuild your friends list, and vice versa. (side note: FOAF/RDF might be useful here)
Of course, if various services opened up a little more, there wouldn't be much of a need for an open source interoperable social network-network. For example, OpenHive accesses data from two external sites: The Facebook, and Amazon. We did nasty screen scraping from The Facebook. We used well documented APIs for Amazon. I'm sure you can guess which we preferred.
I didn't really plan it this way, but I think I'm saying what I said in my last post: OpenSource is great, but open APIs are better.
1Some numbers on his blog, also see articles in our school paper and Stanford's.
