Socially more acceptable?
Diaspora, a social network work-in-progress that is ideologically opposed to Facebook has released its source code in the hope that fellow code-wizards can improve the service.
Diaspora's blog said: "This is now a community project and development is open to anyone with the technical expertise who shares the vision of a social network that puts users in control."
A quartet of US students launched the project in April which was made possible by donations from investors who were attracted to the idea of a more private social network. They described it as "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network".
The software lets users set up personal servers know as ‘seeds' and completely control what information they choose to share without it being stored centrally or used by third parties.
Raphael Sofaer, one of the four founders told The New York Times centralised networks like Facebook ‘are not necessary' and offer little value for the amount of privacy its users sacrifice.
The project's blog said: "We live our real lives in context, speaking from whatever aspect of ourselves that those around us know. Social tools should work the same way. Getting the source into the hands of developers is our first experiment in making a simple and functional tool for contextual sharing. Diaspora is in its infancy, but our initial ideas are there."
The site currently shares status messages and photos privately with friends and allows people to befriend other users across the web irrespective of where the Diaspora seed is located.
Users can also manage friends and upload pictures in a format similar in look to Facebook, but unlike the social networking giant which now has over 500m users, Diaspora's traffic is signed and encrypted with the exception of photos which it is working on.
However, the service has big hopes for its Alpha release in October including internationalization, data portability and most notably integration with its Facebook rival.
The developers were keen to point out the service is currently not bug free or that all its features are complete but it is gradually putting users in control. It is accepting patches and has urged users to log glitches on the site's ‘bugtracker'.
