Primarily, what we want to accomplish is to provide social networks for community sites. We're building this partly to satisfy our own needs, and partly to offer an open-source response to the new entries into the space by the likes of Microsoft and Google.

We'd like to provide the following feature set in a configurable manner.

For those more advanced users, we would like to provide an extensible API and database schema for creating richer social networks.  This also can allow potential developers using Sociopath to integrate their sites more fully with a social network.

Hey, with most of these projects, one of the goals is to learn something new. Social networks are a hot new technology and what better way to learn about it than rolling your own.