Matt Mullenweg, the guy behind WordPress, announced today that he’s hired someone to develop social networking features for WordPress:

Some of you may remember when I wrote about Chickspeak, a WordPress MU-based social network. Andy Peatling, the fellow behind it, later decided to recreate the work he had done as an Open Source effort he called BuddyPress. And it was good.

Today I’m happy to announce that Andy has joined Automattic full-time and we’ll be taking the BuddyPress project under our wing. We will grow it and support it the same way we support WordPress, MU, bbPress, Akismet, and more.

It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.

We wrote about BuddyPress in December, but the project had been mothballed since then, because of lack of time on Peatling’s part. This should give Peatling the time and the resources to develop the project.

What’s this mean for WordPress users? A year from now, you should have the option to have your site not just be a blog or a podcast, but an extensible social network, based on open standards.

When we talked with the guys from Ask A Ninja recently, they were excited about adding a third-party social network to their site. BuddyPress should eventually make it just as easy for indie podcasters and bloggers to create custom, self-hosted social networks.