Open Source Facebook Contender Releases Code to Public
Diaspora, an open source challenger to Facebook, hit its first milestone Wednesday, releasing code for fellow hackers to test drive and improve.
The code is not ready for general use, and you can’t go to Diaspora.com to use it. Instead, those with programming skills can install it on their servers, test the code, and work on it — adding features via a shared code hosting service called Github, where the changes can be pulled into the main code base. Diaspora warned that there are known security issues with the code, making it clear this was a release for developers, not early adopters. The code is based on Ruby on Rails and MongoDB.
As its name suggests, Diaspora isn’t aiming to turn Diaspora.com into a replacement for Facebook.com, but instead is seeking to create software that allows people to have more control over their social network, without having a single entity holding all the data and making the rules.
