The new Drupal profile/social networking module that Dries Buytaert has been working on is now active at Drupal.org. Members enter information about such things as location, interests, etc. and those descriptions are used to display people with shared interests. The module allows administrators to configure the profile fields and use controlled vocabularies for fields. It's a very nice first crack. So maybe it won't be too hard to start up your own social networking site in a few months when this thing gets more solid. Why not, right? SNSs are a dime a dozen now. If people get interested in contributing code to this open source tool, it can only get better.

To view how this works, view users who describe themselves as residing in the U.S. or who describe themselves as male. The module will also show avatars or pictures if your system is configured to allow them. Very nice. I hope to install this on iaslash when the next release is stable.