I've been working on an open source social networking software called Appleseed for some time now, and its starting to get to be usable beta software. The important thing about Appleseed, which differentiates it from MySpace or Friendster, is that it is open source and distributed. Which means that instead of having one social networking site that everybody joins, you have multiple social networking sites that all work together.

http://appleseed.sourceforge.net

Appleseed allows you to have friends "circles" so you can categorize friends, but then also lets you restrict and allow content based on your friends circles. So people in your Close Friends circle can see journal entries that people in your Family circle can't.

One thing that I've thought about a lot is the idea of integrating file sharing with social networking. Especially the idea of being able to restrict the files you share according to which friends circle the viewing user is in.

Since Appleseed is 100% web based, I figured in order to do this properly, it would require some kind of integration with locally run software. At first I thought I could simply write my own client, but there's an issue of time and trust with that. I thought the best way to approach it is to work out integrating Appleseed and Gnutella.

I figured I'd start this thread to hear ideas and thoughts and concerns.

Feel free to email me or respond here. I'm really excited about this, and I think it could be the "killer app" that can help wrestle social networking away from single-site megacorporations like MySpace.

Also, if anybody would like an invite to the main Appleseed test site, let me know:

http://www.appleseedproject.org

Michael Chisari
michael.chisari@gmail.com

MIchael,

I've previously sent you email on your gmail address, but you've not responded.
I am interested in building further open-source on top of Appleseed and would like to discuss.

Please check your gmail.

Andrew Downing

I think integrating with Gnutella is a quite nice idea.

But it might be a good deal of work, to introduce the circle-idea into a Gnutella Client, except if you store the info about the files on your page and only use the Gnutella client as light-weight fileservers.

It would be partly possible to do that with private networks from Phex, but only by introducing mostly static groups which people can join and leave, and I think that isn't what you want to do.

But I have one interesting read for you, I think:

http://lionshare.its.psu.edu/ - Gnutella based P2P for Universities, which features groups and even integration of web-based sources.

PS: Sorry, that I didn't answer earlier.
I assumed your question had already been answered and didn't read on...
I hope my answer is still interesting to you.

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