Hiya :)
I'm basically thinking out loud, and felt this was the best forum to post in.
I was browsing through _ck_'s top 100 bbpress forum (well, the first one at least http://www.greedyorneedy.com/), and had a look at the site's forum and member profiles such as this:-
http://www.greedyorneedy.com/users/view/id/7412
They look brilliant - facebook esque, and would love to implement something similar to my site (well one of my ideas anyway)
What I suspect is that it is a Wordpress/Wordpress MU plugin, but still if anybody has any ideas to how they achived this, I would love to hear them :)