Diaspora, billed as an open alternative to Facebook, has announced that it will be open-sourced on September 15th.
Diaspora was started as a project by four NYU students, proposing to build an open-source, distributed alternative to Facebook. Diaspora raised over $200,000 on Kickstarter, especially impressive considering they had only set a goal of $10,000.
On September 15th, they will put out a developer release, open their source code repository, publish a roadmap, and shift to a more community-oriented development style. Two of the members of the original team are taking a leave from their studies at NYU to run the project.
There are already some open social media projects out there, most notably, statusnet, a micro-blogging server that provides functionality similar to Twitter, on which the popular site, identi.ca is based. However, while identi.ca has been embraced by the tech community, it has not yet seen widespread adoption. Diaspora may face the same hurdles in stealing market share from Facebook, which has over 500 million active users.
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