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!

I’ve been so busy on other projects for the past couple of months that I haven’t been able to be as involved with the BuddyPress community as I would have liked but with this milestone I’m itching to get back in there and try out all the new stuff and finally get BabbleLounge up an running! The only thing I would like to have seen in this release would be the inclusion of the Photo Albums feature that has been slated for late 2009 (and there isn’t much “late” left).

To find out all the cool new features of BuddyPress 1.1 go read the release announcement, try the demo site or download it for yourself.

Well done Andy and all the contributors for this awesome platform!

A site, that in an ideal world I would be able to take advantage of, called WPMU DEV Premium is just about to hit the milestone of having 100 plugins, themes and videos for use with WordPress MU and the BuddyPress.  As with so many it seems, I can’t afford the outlay for a membership as none of my projects are profit bearing. If I could justify the cost however there is one plugin in particular that I see real value in:

Supporter

The Supporter plugin provides a seemless way to integrate a paid upgrades feature similar to the wordpress.com upgrades system, in fact WPMU DEV Premium also offer a plugin called Upgrades that does EXACTLY what the wordpress.com system does using a system of credits as opposed to supporters paypal $ based system. This is a feature which with the exception of Supporter has been sorely missing in the WPMU world so this definately fills a significant gap in the market. The only thing that would make this plugin a complete no-brainer for me would be support for BuddyPress and I’m sure that’s not far away!

Now if I could just find the money for a subscription perhaps I could start monetising some of these projects!

Congratulations James and Andrew on reaching the Ton!