Niche social networks welcome: Wikia open sources social tools

Community wiki building site Wikia, has announced they are allowing their social networking platform to become open source. This will allow anyone to easily create a social community complete with profiles, avatars, friending, etc… within their MediaWiki-based wiki sites.

For a good example of a social network built into a wiki-based site check out ArmchairGM, the sports wiki database, which Wikia purchased in December of 2006 for more than $2 million (our coverage).

When most people hear the word “wiki” they think of Wikipedia - and rightfully so - however sites like ArmchairGM and Mahalo with their social components show that wikis can be used to build sites far beyond the traditional text-heavy, encyclopedia-inspired sites.

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick thinks the open source availability of these social tools could help bolster niche communities and potential to erode some of the popularity of the main social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Certainly, creating a niche community is the idea behind a Hollywood-centric social site The Biz (our coverage). However, now with these open source social tools, you won’t need a big company like Variety backing you to create such a site.

Also check out our coverage on Wikia Search, the community-based search engine that Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales launched last month.

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