Via TechCrunch (“WordPress: The Social Network“):
“Can WordPress become the basis of a social network? Automattic founder and WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg hinted today on his blog that WordPress might go in a more social direction. He announced a new hire, Andy Peatling, the developer behind BuddyPress, a social network built on top of WordPress. BuddyPress will now become an official WordPress project.”
This is a really interesting concept that I plan on investigating further when time permits. From the sound of things access to BuddyPress has also been temporarily disabled, though TechCrunch has indicated there are alternative means of acquiring the code via cached copies on Google servers and Google Code.
Perhaps not surprisingly people are wondering out loud why on Earth we need yet another social network when there are seemingly more of them now than you can possibly use. However WordPress founder, Matt Mullenweg, is quick to point out the circumstances of this development are an entirely different scenario:
“The world doesn’t need another social network, it needs a thousand networks that let you own your data and interconnect using open standards. We invest countless hours giving our data to networks like MySpace, essentially sharecropping on their land for the privilege of being able to connect to our friends. It’s our friends, our time, our connections, our data — it should be our software.”
When you use MySpace or Facebook, your information is stored on somebody else’s servers, rely on a foreign set of racks and disaster recovery equipment, lay within the shadow of another organisation’s security umbrella, and are framed within an established set of business rules and policy that you can only agree or disagree with. Ultimately you have minimal control over anything.
WordPress and BuddyPress are open source, and free. And as the saying goes: “This is free as in freedom and free as in beer.” The code is openly available to anyone who opts to download and tinker with it. You don’t need to know what you’re doing, or even have your own server; but if you do you can avail yourself to a tremendous amount of power and flexibility in use.
Free as in freedom refers to the premise that the all program code is available under a public license. This public license permits developers to download, install and change the code however they see fit, so long as the result adheres to and is released under a similar license. This has powerful implications, because you can effectively take a pre-existing, fully functional and time-tested application and customise it to serve your own purposes.
Free as in beer refers to the price: Free. No charge. No fees. Nothing. You download it, you use it and the only financial investment required is the hardware it runs on, the network traffic to deliver the commands and data, and the human resources to support it. There are no fees or hidden costs associated with use of the software whatsoever.
It should also be said that open source software is not created in a vacuum. It is supported by a vibrant, passionate and participatory community of users and developers. This means that an incredible amount of user and technical support exists despite there being no formalised agreements in the way there are with proprietary software. In fact my experience has been that the support is more comprehensive, the response time to questions is faster, and the overall experience is far more positive. This too costs you nothing.
That being said though many companies do exist that cater to businesses that need technical support for open source software and are willing to pay. The point is that avenues exist if you would prefer the free route.
What I will be interested in seeing is how the WordPress/BuddyPress framework stacks up against other highly popular open source social networking programs like Drupal and Elgg. Drupal for example is used by some exceptionally high-profile companies and major music labels. This marks a tremendous victory for open source in its perception and profile in the eyes of an ever so skeptical proprietary-minded public.
Given WordPress’s status as pseudo-market leader in blogging platforms, I see many good things coming out of BuddyPress’s acquisition.
References:
- “WordPress: The Social Network“, TechCrunch, 4 March 2008
- “Automattic Assimilates BuddyPress, Moves Towards Social Networking“, Mashable, 4 March 2008
- “WordPress Social Networks – I’ll Take a Distributed One, Please” Read Write Web, 4 March 2008
- BuddyPress – http://buddypress.com/
- WordPress – http://wordpress.org
