Work on Appleseed has also been progressing rapidly. In the past month, we've added internationalization, theming, and an MVC+plugin framework. You can see our revised roadmap in the svn:

http://svn.appleseedproject.org/trunk/_documentation/ROADMAP.TXT

Here's my public Appleseed profile using an early version of the new theme:

http://developer.appleseedproject.org/profile/michael.chisari

Remote logins, remote friends connections, remote messaging, journals, photos, discussion groups, sophisticated node control, ACL and privacy controls and more are all working, and will be refined in the coming releases, along with all new features like one-click server upgrades, search, micro-blogging, and more.

Michael Chisari
Appleseed - http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

The whole idea of "if you don't want it public, don't put it on the internet" always reminds me of this Onion video:

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village
http://www.theonion.com/video/google-opt-out-feature-lets-users-protect-privacy,14358/

There's no reason that we can't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, even in our online lives. Especially from a technical standpoint. If I share some photos with 10 people, and one of those people decides to copy that photo into an email and send it off to 100 people, then that's a social failure, not a technical one. People I trusted betrayed my trust, on a social level.

But on a technical level, I should be able to share videos or photos or journal posts with a small group of trusted people, and be reasonably secure in the idea that only they will see them. That advertisers won't have access to that photo, that an api won't be able to pull the data without permission, etc. There's nothing extraordinary about that requirement, and that it's treated as absurd and unreasonable shows how far we've fallen from a basic perspective on internet privacy.

Open source can fill the gap. Our incentive, as open source software developers, is to provide the best software possible, and to not skimp on important features like privacy and security. We aren't trying to cater to advertisers, or to build empires based on fads and hype. I've been working on an open source, distributed social networking alternative to Facebook (and Myspace and other "walled gardens") that called Appleseed that focuses on strong privacy.

http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

But most of all, by distributing these services, and allowing users to cancel their profile on one site, sign up for another site, and plug right back into the network they lost, it creates a level of competition so that social networking sites *have* to listen to the concerns of their users. They can't take them for granted. Not just in social networking, if we can continue push for open standards, open protocols, open platforms, etc., it means we have some leverage when a popular service decides to privilege it's revenue stream over the privacy of it's users.

I would never consider asking them for money (although I wouldn't turn it down if they offered :), but I did send them an email right before this storm hit, about working on a common protocol, but they never responded.

"In your CV you state that you are the sole developer for the Appleseed project. Yet elsewhere on your site you state that you are a group of developers. Which one is it?"

I'm the lead programmer, we have people contributing in various ways, but anything that says I'm the sole contributor is definitely outdated, and will be updated soon.

I'm currently the only programmer, but I'm definitely not the only collaborator. I've been working with at least two other people throughout this project, and lately, we've gotten interest from designers (which is good, the default theme needs some serious work!) We have a few people interested in working on translations into German, Spanish, and Turkish, to name a few. And we have always had a lot of interest and feedback from people running their own appleseed nodes.

Plus, the source has been open and available to the public since almost the very beginning, around 2005.

As the poster above stated, I am aware of that issue. Also, the latest tarball is VERY out-of-date. For the past couple years, I've been committing to svn (which is open to the public for checkouts at svn.appleseedproject.org) instead of creating distribution packages.

I'm working on getting an up-to-date tarball package out within the next few days (tonight if I have the time). In the meantime, if you'd like to try it out, you can send an email to invite@appleseedproject.org to get an invite code, so you can test out the beta site:

http://appleseedproject.org/

It was actually more like one year, although I was silently committing to the svn without doing much promotion for the year before that. We just couldn't get momentum going, so at some point, jobs and personal lives took over.

This time around, it's different, though. I have to thank the Diaspora* folks, even if they don't end up coding anything, they've really gotten people to start thinking about open source, distributed social networking. And that's a positive for everyone.

We're trying to raise money the same way Diaspora* did, using a similar website. I don't expect to get as much as they did, but I think it's definitely possible to meet the goal.

http://indiegogo.com/The-Appleseed-Project

The Diaspora* guys certainly have a lot of heart, and now they've got some serious expectations to contend with, but they're really not unique, and there are a lot of projects that are way ahead of them. The idea that they can catch up in a "3-month sprint" makes me skeptical.

I've been working, off and on, on a project called Appleseed, an open source, distributed social networking software that is pretty far along, and already works as a proof-of-concept. I started in 2004, and it's been a big undertaking. There's also projects like OneSocialWeb, and Elgg that they'll be competing with, not to mention all the other smaller projects that may not be out of pre-alpha, but still have more code completed and problems solved than they do at this point.

I wish them the best of luck, and I don't want to begrudge them their success, but having been through what I've done already, I don't envy the task ahead of them.

Until then, I think it's best that people support projects with some code under their belt. If not that, at the very least, a solid plan for what they're trying to build and how.

http://www.drumbeat.org/project/appleseed-social-networking

http://www.drumbeat.org/project/appleseed-social-networking

(NOTE: This project is already significantly along, and works as a proof-of-concept. What is needed is a lot of polish and testing.)

The Appleseed Project is an effort to create open source Social Networking software that is based on a distributed model. For instance, a profile on one Appleseed website could "friend" a profile on another Appleseed website, and the two profiles could interact with each other.

Apart from being distributed, Appleseed will also have a strong focus on privacy and security, as well as a commitment to seeing the user as an online citizen, as opposed to a consumer to be targetted. This is in stark contrast to current social networking websites, who rely heavily on ad placement and data mining of their users.

The first goal is to create a codebase for basic interaction, such as creating profiles, creating and participating in message groups, journals and comments, etc.

Eventually, Appleseed will encompass many different aspects, from mail to messaging to journals/blogs to photo uploads and management. A module architecture is also in the works for even greater extensibility.

Development currently uses Object Oriented PHP4, MySQL (InnoDB), XHTML, Javascript, and CSS2. Mozilla/Firefox will be the target platform.

Whoops, forgot the link:

http://appleseed.sourceforge.net/

There's also Appleseed, which I worked on for a few years, before running out of time and resources. It's about 80% done, and it already works as a distributed system. It need a lot of polish, but it's already there in terms of what's possible.

I'd love to keep working on it, I have a lot of ideas about where to go from her.

"or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day."

I don't have a problem with this. Let's get building.

Eventually we'll turn towards the sun, and nuclear will only be our failsafe, but I have no problem with it filling in the gaps.

How Not To Fail At Life:

http://img242.imageshack.us/img242/6827/howtonotfailatlifepn3he9.png

(The best advice you will ever get from 4Chan)

With 400 million US "invested" beforehand in support for the "Iranian opposition"

The $400 million went to supporting groups like the Jundallah, not for reformist politicians like Mousavi and Tehrani students who like rock music and hate the moral police.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jundallah

No amount of money can buy a popular uprising. Sorry.

"since some of the very lawyers who have been representing them have been appointed to the highest echelons of the Obama DoJ."

Sometimes people just need a reminder that there is no grouping of people with less principles than Lawyers. We made the assumption that, since RIAA lawyers were hired to the DOJ, that they would find in favor of the RIAA. But it seems that lawyers are almost always megaphones for who is signing their paycheck.

And in this situation, it worked out in our favor.