Back in December of 2007, GigaOM’s Anne Zelenka made a plea for WordPress as a social network, herself citing Chris Messina (Citizen Agency) and others’ DISO as an example of what such a network might look like. The idea of a WordPress as a full-fledged “distributed” social network took hold. The consensus was that, particularly from the standpoint of the thousands of niche social networks out there, this would be a welcome development.

On Tuesday, March 4th, Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg made public the company’s hiring of Andy Peatling of Chickspeak and BuddyPress fame. As of the initial publishing of this prediction, it remains unclear whether Automattic actually acquired any assets as part of the deal, as Dave Recordon of Six Apart and OpenID assumes in this comment over on Techcrunch.

Nonetheless, it has been confirmed that BuddyPress will become an official WordPress project, or as Mullenweg put it “we’ll be taking the BuddyPress project under our wing.” BuddyPress’ explicit mission, by the way, is to “transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform."

As additional background, Erick Shonfeld heard back from Mullenweg, who said that “The world doesn’t need another social network, it needs a thousand networks that let you own your data and interconnect using open standards . .it’s our friends, our time, our connections, our data — it should be our software.”

The idea that WordPress is moving toward becoming a “distributed” social network, as Zelenka originally suggested, is pretty obvious at this point. But the question remains as to whether the forthcoming WordPress integrated social networking functionality, despite being 100% free as Mullenweg suggests, will also enable the larger vision of “distributed” social networking. This larger vision is one in which data portability allows a user to move seamlessly from one network to another.

Open Source does not necessarily mean Open Data. Which is just to say, is WordPress building another walled garden? Above, Mullenweg speaks out explicitly against this idea, but clearly the likes of Recordon are frazzled by the idea of WordPress as a competitive threat. And even despite the dominance of Facebook and MySpace, the data land grab is far from over, in no small part because certain valuations are dependant on monetizing that data, which in most scenarios involves having at least some degree of control over it.

As Marshall Kirkpatrick points out, “Now that there are millions upon millions of dollars in play, is Automattic moving toward a strategy that will prioritize growing its own market share far beyond (and sometimes at the expense of) a broader vision of user-centric social networking?”

This is a prediction with two conditions that must BOTH be met for the prediction to be judged favorably. This prediction will be judged on December 1, 2008.

First, Automattic will roll out a new, publicly available version of WordPress (or a new official plug-in or plug-in suite) with social networking functionality baked into the product (or, into the plug-in or plug-in suite). BuddyPress in its current form does not qualify, despite the fact that it now lives under the WordPress banner.

AND second, WordPress will make users’ data full portable, so that it is possible to move social networking data both in and out of WordPress. This condition requires that such portability be actually present in publicly available code (i.e. a mere announcement of the intention to do so will not cut it). It is also understood that in the case that only some of the data that lives inside of WordPress is made portable, whether this condition is met (i.e. how “fully” is interpreted) will be at the sole discretion of the Standard’s editors.