Hi, I’m Casey. I developed Scriblio, which is really just a faceted search and browse plugin for WordPress that allows you to use it as a library catalog or digital library system (or both).
I’m not the only one to misuse WordPress that way. Viddler is a cool YouTube competitor built atop WordPress that allows you to tag and comment inside the timeline. StayPress is a property management and booking system also built atop WordPress.
BuddyPress is a social network in a box — really, take a look at the theme screenshots. Each user has a profile and friends. Users form groups and engage in discussions or private messaging. And of course, it’s WordPress afterall, users can each have one or more blogs. And then all of that is brought together in this activity updates view.
And again, because BuddyPress is just a bunch of WordPress plugins, you can use it in conjunction with Scriblio to get faceted searching and browsing of all sorts of materials, and, perhaps, use it in your community to build a community driven digital archive.
But this social network isn’t necessarily your social network and not everybody can login to my system. The solutions so far are OpenID, which makes it easy and secure to use multiple systems, and OAuth, which makes it easy and secure for users to give other applications or websites permission to use your data without having to toss their username and password around the web like confetti. And those are foundations of DiSo, the distributed social network, which leverages open formats to reduce social network fatigue (see xfn, hcard, and xoxo).
And that’s cool, because the goal of this isn’t to build a new social network, the goal is to build new applications that are socially aware (and geographically aware too).