Blog de Puree

TechCrunch blogs that Automattic founder and WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg may look towards developing social networking tools for its famous blog software.

The news is that Matt hired Andy Peatling, “the developer behind BuddyPress, a social network built on top of WordPress. BuddyPress will now become an official WordPress project.”

As many of our readers know, we use WordPress and love its functionality and ease of use. There are a lot of tools, called plugins that can be installed easily into the software and this will take advantage of WordPress’s application program interface (API), an interface for allowing a program to communicate and work with another program. Typically, these exist within online applications.

Despite the conceived glut of social networks and programs already on the ‘Net, Mullenweg said, “The world doesn’t need another social network, it needs a thousand networks that let you own your data and interconnect using open standards.”

I agree. Although a goodly portion of Internet users know and use sites such as MySpace and Facebook, open source and small communities really make the Internet a more interesting space. Using open and common standards, it’s easier for all these smaller communities to connect and communicate. While the larger networks do have their uses and are great financial successes, they do have limitations with flexibility and functionality.

I can’t wait to see what the folks at WordPress come up with.