How Will Open Source Affect the Social Networking Industry?

Welcome to the world of Diaspora! Founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg and his approximately $11.5 Million monster Facebook.com could care less about it’s users privacy. People are getting ticked off. People want some other place to go to connect with their friends. “Screw Facebook and Zuckerberg for not giving us what we want” says thousands of Facebook users. The timing of the release of an Open Source Facebook contender that has privacy of personal data as a strong suit could not have been more perfect.

Diaspora which has been released this year (mid september 2010) is at the time of me writing this post, barely usable. But the project has received over $200,000 in Online Donations according to a report from Wired.com and more importantly is getting a ton of contribution from open source developers around the world. And… the project has just gotten started which has many Facebook haters (like myself) very excited about the possibilities.

Open Source Facebook Alternative? What Does This Really Mean?

Wired.com writer Ryan Singel explained it best in his article on Diaspora. “The idea is to disperse social networking, so that it works more like e-mail, where users can sign-up for an account with any number of providers or buy their own domain name or use a hosted service or even run their own e-mail server – but all can still interact, regardless of how or where their e-mail service is. Diaspora isn’t the only effort at creating so-called federated social networking – there’s a number of other active open source projects, including the Appleseed and OneSocialWeb.”

For a more in-depth look as to why this is so important I recommend reading another article on Wired.com from Ryan Single titled Facebook’s Gone Rouge; It’s Time for an Open Alternative.

A Preview Look @ Diaspora

If this can actually work it’s going to be a game changer for sure. So what does Diaspora look like so far? Here’s a sneek peak of it’s alpha version for developers…

The Diaspora Roadmap

The Diaspora Roadmap page on GitHub shows you what is already implemented in the code and what is coming up for Diaspora. So far these are the features that are already built:

• 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).

It’s coming along. But in order for Diaspora to come together and actually contend with Facebook it’s going to need contribution from thousands of people which leads me to my next 2 points.

Contributing If You Are NOT a Developer

Help contribute to Diaspora by setting up a test account at pivots.joindiaspora.com and leaving feedback at their GitHub. Here you can submit “issues” which can be bugs you find, features you would like to see etc. This is one of the best ways to contribute to an Open Source project, especially one of this magnitude. Don’t think for one moment that Developers alone will be able to build this thing. It takes savvy end users to give good solid feedback for what is working and not working with usability to help this project trump Facebook.

Even if you just leave 1 comment or feedback. Think if 1,000,000 Facebook users just left 1 piece of feedback how much valuable information that could give to thousands of contributing developers worldwide to Diaspora.

Contributing If You ARE a Developer

Download the source code of Diaspora from it’s GitHub project page and follow the instructions for installing it on your machine. The code is based on Ruby on Rails and MongoDB. You have to fill out their Contributor Agreement form before you actually submit patches and have those patches accepted. Consider this opportunity to be a part of building the next major social application… the one that kills Facebook!

What Facebook Has That Diaspora Doesn’t (updated)

• The ability to auto embed videos on a wall or in a thread
• A more complex profile information
• Like or Fan type pages
• Pending Notifications
• Sidebar Widgets (photos, friends, profile information etc.)
• The ability to “Like” something
• A live chat widget
• Friend/Contact finder – gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail etc.
• I would find more, but clicking around Facebook is driving me crazy!

The Key to Diaspora’s Success = Consistent Improvement & Facebook Integration

Diaspora doesn’t need to be equivalent to Facebook overnight. It is important however for Diaspora to continue to make code updates and improvements consistently through the end of this year 2010 and throughout all of 2011. Otherwise the excitement will die down and this project will never have the gas to get off the ground.

One of the features Diaspora has laid out in it’s Roadmap for future development is “Facebook Integration.” If an end user can quickly connect/import it’s information from Facebook to Diaspora it will drastically increase it’s number of adopters assuming all other Facebook features are already built in. This will be a huge need. Otherwise it’s going to be tough getting Facebook users to leave Facebook regardless of how good Diaspora’s functionality and usability are.

The Importance of Diaspora’s Success

If Diaspora can actually pull off this David vs. Goliath attempt by taking away millions of users from Facebook and creating an open-source, privacy secure, use anywhere Social Network it will be added to the history books as one of the important events in the Internet’s history. Open Source will become a household name and more and more open source projects will start up with the confidence of beating out their proprietary competitors.

If Diaspora can pull this off and become a true Facebook contender, this will be the greatest Open Source accomplishment since WordPress. Stay tuned!

What Diaspora SHOULD Look Like

A couple years ago when Facebook made it public that they were re-designing their interface, a designer by the name of Barton Smith created a design of what he thought would be the best new makeover for Facebook. Facebook foolishly did nothing with Barton’s design. If Diaspora were smart, they would use this design. I would explain in words why but I’ll just let you see for yourself…

What are your thoughts of an Open Source Facebook? What do you like or dislike about Diaspora?