DIASPORA IS REAL! Developer Release Launched

An article by Prashish Rajbhandari    5 Comments

Diaspora, an open-source Facebook competitor, made its first source codes available to general public on 15th September, 2010.

Tweet by @joindiaspora : DIASPORA IS REAL! blog: http://bit.ly/9vbQoE; code: http://bit.ly/cJVIIN #diaspora

SCREENSHOTS: joindiaspora

The so-called open-source Facebook alternative – Diaspora, started off as a Summer Project for four students: Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy from New York University’s Courant Institute. The project was influenced by the massive criticism of Facebook’s privacy policies and user control. Unlike Facebook, Diaspora aims to create “an intrinsically more private social network”. The Diaspora team described their project as a, “distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, it will let us connect without surrendering our privacy.” It means that the computers (“seeds”) will be owned by the user (directly hosted by them or on a rented server) and each seed will be directly connected with each other with no central server in the middle to manage the connections or meddle with user’s data. The seeds makes use of information of various sources like Facebook, Twitter or any other social network. The complete control of privacy and sharing control is centralized to the seed. FAQ about Diaspora

SCREENSHOTS: joindiaspora

The interface of the latest developer release looks quite similar to Facebook. It currently allows only status updates and photo uploads with the added feature to share your statuses and photos privately in near real time with your friends through “aspects”. You can find people across the internet regardless of Diaspora’s seed location.

The Diaspora Team plans to release the alpha version on October. The few features they plan to include are :

• Facebook Integration

• Internationalization

• Data Portability

Diaspora is in its preliminary stage and is by no means bug free or feature complete. The Diaspora team has requested developers to review the initial version and send reports of security holes and bugs.

Developers, our code is on github, our tracker is public, we have a developer mailing list, and we are happily accepting patches:

• Github
• Tracker
• Test Status
• Roadmap & Wishlist
• Development Mailing List
• Discuss Mailing List

To stay up to date with the progress of Diaspora:

• twitter
• identi.ca
• homepage
• mailing list

Doesn’t this situation remind you of when Firefox was open sourced when Internet Explorer was dominating the web?