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According to this year's Comscore stats, consumer publishing platform Wikia has surpassed DIY social network competitor Ning for monthly unique visitors. Since July 2008 the company's traffic has more than doubled from 2.8 million to 6.5 million unique US visitors per month. Despite abandoning Wikia search in early March, it seems Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has built another great company. As of this evening, Wikia's CEO Gil Penchina is announcing the company's profitability due to its custom sponsorships program.

Mahalo popularized the term "human powered search" when they launched just over a year ago. Many of the pitches we get still use that term as part of their positioning. Many of them are bootstrapped, so the price of entry is clearly low. But the upside has not yet been established. In this post we look at the pros and cons of human powered search engines in general, look at some differentiating strategies and ask "what is the future for Human Powered Search?"

Wikia, the independent commercial wiki site founded by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, is releasing components of its very nice social networking toolset under the GNU General Public License 2.0.

The ability to set up an Open Source social network is now available to anyone who can put a Mediawiki install on their servers. Look out Ning and other proprietary social networking platforms!