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eg http://onesocialweb.org/

The big problem is that they're reinventing the wheel several times along the way. OneSocialWeb had a MUCH better idea. They simply boot strapped their API for sharing off the pre-existing XMPP/Jabber standard, and it works really well. They wrote a plugin for the Openfire XMPP server, leveraging their pre-existing presence, messaging, security, login, and user management structure. Hell, it even pulls my XMPP groups and uses them as groups for setting permissions on posts. If they could get the attention Diaspora is getting, I think the progress to a usable alternative could be far quicker.

The fact is, Diaspora's young team is showing just how young they are. Sure, they have energy, but they also have a case of NIH and needing to code everything from the ground up to feel good about it, instead of leveraging somebody else's having already solved part of your problem so that you can get on to solving the REAL issue. They're blocking IE, for fuck's sake. That's stupid. In order for this project to be useful, it has to INCLUDE as many people as possible, not EXCLUDE for arbitrary nerd-religion wars.

The only reason they got as much attention and funding as they did was the fortuitous timing as Facebook ignited the internet's collective nerd rage and they announced their project, because frankly they're Doing It Wrong(tm) pretty much every step of the way since then.

I'm in a slightly different set: I want identity in a social browser, but using an open standard like XMPP + extensions (see any number of developing social networks, like OneSocialWeb) so that all this same stuff works but I don't need Facebook.

I guess this the intro page for onesocialweb?
http://onesocialweb.org/

Looks promising.

I read TFA (I know ...) and comments and many of the issues mentioned are addressable within Rails generally so I don't think that saying the project has no chance is fair to either the developers or to the OSS devs the author besmirches. That said, I have never been very pro-Diaspora and didn't expect anything secure or even really working in the first release from that team: they're just a bunch of college kids with little experience on summer break, after all.

I still think that extending XMPP is the way to go -- there's no need to reinvent the wheel and XMPP has had time to work the security issues out already and has quite a few implementations available. Check http://onesocialweb.org/. The code has been available since Diaspora was announced and is developing quickly. XMPP with extensions has the benefit of having several large IM networks already in service that could simply move to the newer protocol. If Yahoo!, MSN, Baidu, and GTalk all went that way, Facebook would have to fall in line and update its XMPP, too.

There are quite a few projects to create this:

http://www.elgg.org/ though it is not distributed (they are working on it)

http://onesocialweb.org/ is xmpp based, i have set up my own instance.

http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social has just started and is a gnu project.

There are some standards to help this kind of thing but most are not complete.
you may want to look into foaf for storing a social graph for example.

Please chat with other people if you find this interesting.
IRC chat: #social on freenode

I really don't get this. Everyone seems to be talking about Diaspora, which is still vaporware, when there are actual products that work right now. You can either go with the StatusNet + plugins route (implementing OStatus), or you can choose OneSocialWeb (XMPP+extensions). Both are Free software. OSW is Apache licensed, FFS: how much more could you ask for?

Both of these products actually exist and work now. StatusNet is mature. OSW is still alpha, but fairly complete. It would be much better for everyone to hitch their wagons to one of these than to support some college students who may or may not know what they're doing and whose goal appears to be to "scrape Twitter and Flickr." That will never work. You have to be able to post status updates, pictures, videos, and blogs all within the same interface and have people be able to comment on or "Like" directly from that same interface. You can't expect people to leave Facebook for something cobbled together from pieces and lacking half the functionality.

I hope I'm wrong about this project.

Jabber/XMPP works terrific, thanks for asking! And OneSocialWeb is exactly what TFA is asking for!

Add http://onesocialweb.org/ and you have status updates and privacy control too!

What we need is a standard. Look at the social@xmpp.org email list for a discussion. Using XMPP, OpenID, and OAuth, you could pretty much solve this problem. Look, someone has!

I know a lot of people have given you crap about this choice, but I think it's great. We should all have the freedom to have our blog wherever we want, post our pictures and videos to any service (even our own server), and set up events on any calendar without being shut out of social sites. I shouldn't have to have twenty-five accounts. I've given up several in the last few months, and am glad to see a move to OpenID and OAuth by sites like Twitter.

That's not enough, though. We need glue, too. I'm a big proponent of an open, federated social networking standard. I think we (techies) should look at http://www.onesocialweb.org/ for inspiration.

I also think that whatever this standard ends up being, it should be built into web browsers (with profiles and private browsing, of course) so that online identity becomes more reachable. I wrote an open letter to Mozilla and Google about it.

I've been thinking of something along this very line, but I'm a little torn: distributed is the right way to go, but to implement something akin to the facebook newsfeed, it seems like the right answer is an atom feed that all your friends subscribe to (and you to theirs), but then either you have something downloading theirs all the time, and then your info is stored on someone else's computer where it's easy pickings for a bot (and the opportunities for exposure multiplied), or you wait to fetch all 100+ friends' feeds. I'm not sure if the risk of the former is *that* big, after all, it wouldn't be hard for a bot to get the facebook login and skim all the info, but it would be rather harder than just picking off the local cache.

Building an distributed network on top of HTTP protocols (atom) will lead to privacy problems... It seems necessary to have a server-side support that will also implement some privacy policies which would allow you to define who gets access to which post. Also, the only way to get real time updates is by some polling, which may be resource intensive...

Using XMPP (Jabber) as a base for some kind of distributed social network seems to me like a better idea to me... It is still distributed, you can run your own server that will host your posts and will push all the updates to those subscribed, implement some privacy rules...

There is already a project that tries to do something like that: http://onesocialweb.org/

If someone smarter then me doesn't hurry up and develop one you all will have to deal with whatever mediocre product I come up with.

You can join the http://onesocialweb.org/ project, building a distributed social network protocol on top of XMPP together with other mediocre developers...

Will it eventually be possible to have a social-networking standard so that anyone can run their own server, just as with email? In that case it wouldn't matter if one friend uses facebook, another myspace, a third linkedin; they would all adhere to the same standard and so which particular social-networking service you use would become irrelevant.

It is possible and it is already happening... http://onesocialweb.org/ tries to build open social network protocol on top of XMPP...

Any outlook for good federated, multi-server, distributed and de-centralized social networking? I know there's status.net, where interesting stuff is happening...

http://onesocialweb.org/ The protocol is an extension of XMPP and other standards... The implementation is still in very early alpha-stage, though...

I appreciate your setup, but

1. it shouldn't be that hard, and
2. it doesn't really integrate anything. It's more like what Adium does for your IM mess.

We need a social media standard with federation. Look at the Social (XMPP) mailing list. They're trying hard.

Someone with a real spec and a real product just came out of the woodwork, too. http://onesocialweb.org/ is set to be released under an Apache 2 license.

The OpenSocial mailing list was notified today about a project that was announced at FOSDEM 10: OneSocialWeb. It extends XMPP to handle stuff like activity streams and third-party apps. It's set to be released under an Apache license and will provide a completely federated social network. I'm very excited.

Screencast with working client and server. The project is requesting developer help.

The OpenSocial mailing list was notified today about a project that was announced at FOSDEM 10: OneSocialWeb. It extends XMPP to handle stuff like activity streams and third-party apps. It's set to be released under an Apache license and will provide a completely federated social network. I'm very excited.

Screencast with working client and server. The project is requesting developer help.