Yes, I had been waiting for BuddyPress with eager anticipation and started to read your post here with renewed anticipation for the Xiando Social Networking plugin, only to find their site is down at the moment.

You are right that it has been kept well hidden – I had never heard of it – so let’s hope it does not disappear for too long.

I certainly commend the BuddyPress developer for handing his code over for others to take forward and I agree with your idea about people seeing whether they can merge the best of each of these together, although I do not know what the licence is for the Xiando project.

Do you think there might be a ‘usefulness’ in having a place where people who essentially need help with their projects, perhaps through time constraints, can find others who may be able to lend a hand, perhaps because they do not want to embark on a full project of their own? Or do forums and general contacts work OK?

I was thinking beyond just WordPress Mu here, but Open Source blog/cms generally.

Just an idle thought.