It may sound like either a astronomical research project or a Star Wars spin- off, but Project Darkstar is an open source infrastructure from Sun Microsystems that states “simplify the development and operation of massively scalable online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications.”
The advertising sounds promising like many sites, the emphasis seems to be on gaming throughout the material, interesting they threw in the term “social networking applications” specifically in opening descriptions.
I believe worthy of investigation, if only to see how that solve some classic problems. So, Learn some more, Start your rockets and Participate.