Last week Wednesday the Diaspora team released the source code for their social networking system to the world. The distributed, open source, so-called Facebook competitor released its code to the public recently but there seems to be some misunderstandings about what the release is all about

Diaspora, being a distributed system, is actually a network of multiple instances of the software Diaspora. These instances are called pods. One of the oldest and biggest Diaspora pod, poddery.com is at the verge of closing down. If poddery.com is shut down, it will be a great morale loss to the diaspora culture.

The popular social networking site Facebook just announced a Chinese version, but similar Chinese-based Web sites such as Xiaonei and Hainei have been struggling there. However, since April, UCenter Home, an open source social network service based on PHP and MySQL, is pushing open social networking in China.

Elgg is an open source application for rolling out a social network. It installs like any Web-based software, but instead of a blog or a wiki, it gives you all the components of a social networking site -- your own MySpace!

Veteran tech entrepreneur Bob Bickel has let out a whisper of his new venture, Ringside Networks, which will aim to make social networking applications work outside the network.

We’ve been going through quite a lot in terms of development over the past month, and with our switch over to a versioning system, stable builds, and a development branch, we would like to take the logical next step in getting Diaspora into the hands of people that want to set up a pod themselves, by helping us make linux distribution packages of Diaspora.

Sean Tilley from the Diaspora project talks about the nature of privacy on the web, and the importance and potential future of decentralized social networking.

After I wrote about the Diaspora project a few weeks ago, I was contacted by Michael Chisari of the Appleseed Project, which is basically the same thing and predates Diaspora by several years.

Ubuntero.com is a one-of-a-kind social network designed by and for Ubuntu users, developers, and evangelists. Registration is finally open! (The site is down at the moment because they got dugg, but it might be worth a look)