Social Networks have become big business on the World Wide Web, with companies like MySpace and Facebook worth millions of dollars. They make their money through a combination of advertising and customer lock-in, where people have to use their service because that is what their friends use.
Blogs are a form of social network on their own. People can upload their photos, share their favourite links and write posts and memos. Some will let you use microblogging; others can integrate this from other platforms such as Twitter. All will let you comment on them somehow, and using RSS and Atom feeds you can subscribe to other blogs and keep updated on what your friends are doing.
All of these mean you have an extremely flexible and extremely open social network that is accessible to any operating system, with an enormous number of desktop- and web-based clients. You have the ultimate redundancy in that it would be impossible to bring the whole network down in one go. Blogs hosted at larger sites will have some sort of fail-over of their own, vastly increasing the resistance of the network as a whole to attack or failure.
And all it takes to join this network is a blog of your own—either hosted yourself or with a third party—and a feed client.
