At WordCamp NZ a couple months ago we were lucky enough to have a Town Hall style Q&A with Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress. During the Q&A I got to ask a couple of questions one of which was about WordPress, and by extension Automattic’s, asperations in the social networking space and whether they saw themselves ultimately competing in some fashion with FaceBook and MySpace via their “Social Network in a Box” BuddyPress project. Having watched some of the other Q&A’s Matt’s been doing at subsiquent WordCamps and have noticed that the social line of questioning keeps coming up.

Matt’s jokes aside I very much believe that the direction WordPress is heading in will naturally make it’s .com arm a competitor of sorts, if not directly, to the MySpaces and Facebooks of the world as the single user and multi-user codebases merge and BuddyPress matures.

There are already a growing number of alternative WordPress driven offerings to AutoMattic’s WordPress.com springing up such as incsub’s blogs.mu and wp.mu which allows users to set up there own branded multi-user WordPress offerings without having to deal with installation and configuration of WordPress mu on their own server. I think we are also going to see an explosion of smaller independant, and potentially connected, niche social networks built on the WordPress/BuddyPress platform due to the unprecidented level of flexability, accessability and control and with far greater customisation potential via Plugins and Themes than any of the current solutions out there such as Ning and Virb.

Gravatar, already used extensivly across the various WordPress properties, and other AutoMattic offerings such as Intense Debate and PollDaddy will also likely be key elements in the social evolution of WordPress.

With over 5 million WordPress.com blogs and 5.5 million wordpress 2.8 downloads (and counting) simply connecting all those blogs together makes for a pretty sizable social network right off the bat… it’s no Facebook for sure but it’s going to interesting to watch over the coming months.

I’ll be watching with great interest to see what WordPress 2.9, 3.0 and beyond do in the social space… I see a bright, fun filled and SOCIAL future for WordPress!