It’s always good to know what the competition is up to, right? On that note, Ubuntu has announced the codename for their upcoming version 10.10, Maverick Meerkat. Say that five times fast.

Canonical promises to push social-networking services to the forefront of the popular open-source distro.

“We’re booting really fast these days, but the final push remains,” said Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s chief executive on his blog.

“Changes in the toolchain may make us even faster for every application. We’re social from the start, but we could get even more tightly connected, and we could bring social features into even more applications.”

The company, however, is still perfecting version 10.4 so an official 10.10 release is still a ways off.