I have been advocating for blog networks to evolve into social networks for quite some time now. I have discussed the same here, here and here.
The response was great, which included some very good and worthy suggestions from Chubbs, Mike Rundle, Martin, Roy T, Martin, and others.

The idea of metamorphosing our blog network Instablogs into a social network was in my mind from last 10 months or so, but we started the actual work three months back. We have launched a private beta for the new Instablogs v2.0 yesterday.

This is the official announcement:

On Instablogs 2.0, readers can form small topic-specific communities and tribes; they will find network-wide tagging and searching, a newsroom for news submission/tipping and news link picking. They would also find all the stories in the network aggregated in one place accessible via the reading room. They can also create their network of friends. They can read, rate and comment on stories. You will find features like RSS customization for any channel, topic, writer, tag, etc. You can keep track of your friends, comments and posts easily. You subscribe only those channels you want and unsubscribe others you wish not to read. Personalized homepage is another feature we are sure our members will love. However, if we have to choose our favorite feature of Instablogs v2.0, it has to be Readers’ Rewards whereby our readers can be editors for any channel of their choice.

Instablogs will be open for public on Nov 5, 2006. If any of Instamedia readers would like to beta drive the new Instablogs v2.0, send me an email to info -AT- Instablogs [dot] com.