With the popularity of Facebook, bebo and MySpace, companies are trying to find ways to leverage social networking. However, it can be expensive to build out a strong platform.

Well, things are getting easier; that is, Ringside Networks has launched an open source server to build social networks (it's in the beta mode).

True, there are other systems on the market. However, in the case with Ringside, it allows for seamless integration with other sites, such as Facebook. In other words, it will help companies migrate users to their own platform.

What's more, Ringside allows companies to keep their own branding and the look-and-feel of their own websites.

Oh, and some of the co-founders of Ringside -- Bob Bickel, Rich Friedman and Mark Lugert -- were instrumental in the development of JBoss, which turned out to be one of the most successful open source projects in tech history.

To get some perspective on this, I talked to David DePaolo, who operates WorkCompCentral.com. He has known about Ringside for some time. His take: "It makes sense that someone would start this up as they have with other technologies, and just in time. As technology progresses, we find that it is not all about the technology and patents, it's the application of that technology to a specific market."

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

Ringside: Bringing social networking to all businesses originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Sat, 29 Mar 2008 17:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.