Social networking

This article examines a range of social networking sites from the perspective of opening up the software behind these to create an open software services ecology. "The news in this space is good and bad. Good, because there are a lot of Free and Open Source applications in the area, and also good because most of these work in a distributed model. Bad, though, because there are few or no existing well-known sites that provide social networking services to the public with Free Software (compare Reddit in the social news space). The worst news? Social networking sites like Facebook are some of the most egregious walled gardens on the Internet today ? yet they remain incredibly popular.