Undoing Facebook a Little Bit of Code at a Time

From: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-20016629-62.html

September 16, 2010 6:09 AM PDT

'Anti-Facebook' project releases first batch of code

by Dave Rosenberg

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-20016629-62.html#ixzz0zhTAFUjX

The open-source Diaspora project released on Wednesday the first iteration of its so-called anti-Facebook social-networking application.

According to a blog post, the development team aims to work with the community to enhance and extend the software in order to create a better project. Hardly an original idea in the open-source world, but certainly a logical ideal in light of the fact that social-networking applications require a good bit of insight from users and developers--something we've seen Facebook embrace, occasionally forcibly by its own community.

There are a number of capabilities in the current release that start to outline how the project will take shape:

• Share status messages and photos privately and in near real time with your friends through "aspects."
• Friend people across the Internet no matter where Diaspora seed is located.
• Manage friends using "aspects."
• Upload of photos and albums.
• All traffic is signed and encrypted (except photos, for now).

In addition to the above, there are a few key features on the horizon--namely, Facebook integration and data portability. Both are requirements if the Diaspora project will ever attain a level of critical mass.

What's hard to determine is who the audience is for such a project. Facebook is a consumer application and as far as I know most of the world isn't crying out for its own instance of a social network. Not that such sentiment should hold back the project, but every project needs a motivating factor.

Based on Diaspora's Github project-hosting page, the team is aiming to take down Facebook entirely:

 While Facebook helps the whole digitalized world to keep in touch, it suffers from severe security and privacy issues and is run by a monopolist that designs (and must design, by its nature) the platform's future based on profit-oriented goals.

Stating that "Facebook has a majority market share," the project-hosting page also allegorically references one of the more entertaining bits from Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth's first Ubuntu bug report in 2004, which stated simply that "Microsoft has a majority market share." A bug indeed.

Altruism is a great motivator, but sooner or later economics come into play. I'll continue to follow the evolution of Diaspora to see how this all shakes out.

 Dave Rosenberg dishes up "Software, Interrupted" with nearly 15 years of technology and marketing experience that spans from Bell Labs to multiple start-up IPOs to open-source enterprise software companies. He is co-founder of MuleSource and currently serves as the general manager of Hardy Way. He is an adviser to Canonical, IT Database, Puppet Labs, Riptano, and SOBA Labs. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can contact Dave via e-mail at softwareinterrupted@gmail.com

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-20016629-62.html#ixzz0zhTMLldv