As you may have heard, Diaspora released the source code for their open source social network to developers on 15 September 2010. Now if you haven’t heard about Diaspora before, this is what the creators of this network calls it – “The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network“. A Facebook killer!
This is quite a heavy step for them as they have now opened up the doors to their open source code and any developer can contribute to the Diaspora framework. They are planning to get an Alpha version out of Diaspora in October some time.
Test Diaspora
You can test Diaspora at http://pivots.joindiaspora.com/ and after I registered an account on the test network, I realized that this is definitely something HUGE in the making. Even Mark Zuckerberg the kid CEO donated to this project: “Mark Zuckerberg Donated to Facebook Alternative, Diaspora”
The system was quite slow when I was testing it and a couple of times I got the error message “The page you are looking for is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.” and only after a couple of page refreshes, the content showed up. Lots and lots of traffic to their server today.
If you also want to test it, add me as a friend on their test network anton@pivots.joindiaspora.com.
I saw this sometime last year when they were trying to raise money for the project. I missed out on getting in, but I knew this was a great idea.