what are your thoughts on wordpress blogs for social networking and the impact on SEO these have on your website ?

There is no impacts if you are making wordpress or any blog according to Search engine guidelines. Suppose if you are making your blog and targeting exact keywords then it will impacts on your ranking. Hence if you want to do social networkiing then you can do it according Google guidlines.

Agreed, I don't understand why people think Wordpress websites fail at SEO? If anything, with all the SEO plugins, SEO is better.

Wordpress is SEO friendly CMS framework. We can easily optimize wordpress blog or website by using various SEO plugins like All in One SEO Pack, SEO Ultimate etc and get good traffic and rankings easily through these websites. We can also use wordpress blogs for effective social media marketing by sharing our blogs in facebook, twitter, linkedin, stumbleupon etc. This can also help in getting good links and increasing website traffic.

Building a website on wordpress is a good idea. As wordpress is meant for one of the best and top open source CMS solution, you can go with building a blog or website on wordpress. With numerous wordpress plugins and themes you can make your website more attractive and also functionally good. You will find more info about building a website on wordpress here at http://apptha.com/blog/exclusive-tips-from-top-wordpress-professionals-for-a-better-wordpress-experience/

There are PR8 wordpress sites out there...

Building a blog in WordPress is appreciable because WordPress is a perfect platform for blogging.

WP has some pretty good plugins that you can use for SEO. It is very easy to manage.

Wordpress is one of the best blog provider. It provide so much plugins for seo also. Some one are "all in one seo", "wordpress seo".