Wordpress Going Social?
Gigaom reports that Wordpress might be making a move toward social networking. This is based off of the hiring of Andy Peatling who created BuddyPress, some Wordpress plugins that add social networking features to the blog software.
Wordpress going social could be very interesting. There are already social networks like Xanga that could be classified as social blogging sites because of their social features and their emphasis on blogging.
Adding more social networking features to a blogging network makes sense. Blogging is very social, after all. And the hardest thing for a new blogger to do is to gain an audience, and adding social features would help.
But what could really make it interesting is that Wordpress is both a blog network and blog software. This means that you can either use Wordpress via Wordpress.com and let them host your blog, or you can download the software at Wordpress.org and host the blog yourself.
If Wordpress added social networking features to their blogging network and and let those who host their own Wordpress blogs hook into this network, that could make for something very cool.