Diaspora Releases Code, Gears up for Launch

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Open source Facebook competitor Diaspora released its source code to developers yesterday. The team behind the project posted screen shots on its blog and 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. From now on we will be working closely with the community on improving and solidifying Diaspora.

A couple of Diaspora's features include sharing status messages and photos privately and in near real time, says Mashable. The first alpha, which is expected to include Facebook integration, is due in October. The alpha should also provide internationalization as well as data portability.

Dana Blankenhorn at ZDNet contrasts the social networks to Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader and recommends that the team behind Diaspora find itself a Yoda-like sage to take it to the level beyond media-inspired hype. Doug Aamoth at Techland argues that the idea behind calling Diaspora an anti-Facebook or Facebook killer isn't that simple and that in the end it doesn't matter anyway. Users won't just join Diaspora and quit Facebook, says Aamoth. Diaspora's "seed" idea has its technical limitations, but will enable users to port their information from social network to social network without having to start over from scratch or just create their own social network.