Wordpress moving towards social networking

In the world of the trendy web, very few companies enjoy as much good press for its endeavors as the excellent blogging platform Wordpress. Now its parent company Automattic has announced they have taken over an open source project called BuddyPress that uses the Wordpress backend and number of openly available plugins to build a social network/platform, just in the same way Wordpress makes it easy to make a blog.

BuddyPress will now join the leagues of Akismet and Gravatar, two other Automattic projects that extend and integrate really well with Wordpress and thus potentially with the millions of blogs estimated to be based on that platform. Given the momentum carrying Wordpress today and its wide acceptance within the blogosphere, the timing couldn't be any better. Then again, who needs more social networking these days?