While Diaspora has gotten a lot of attention, and money, as an open-source privacy-centric alternative to Facebook, those four scrappy NYU kids weren’t the first to think of a node-based social networking platform where every user owns their own data: It’s called Appleseed, and it already has working source code.

Appleseed lets users on different node sites to “friend” one another and interconnect, but with granular user controls for how much or how little information you want to share.

Developer Michael Chisari readily admits it needs “a lot of polishing and testing” but envisions a social network that sees “the user as an online citizen, as opposed to a consumer to be targeted…stark contrast to current social networking websites, who rely heavily on ad placement and data mining of their users.”

Appleseed [Sourceforge]

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