A few days ago Diaspora, the venture by four programmers to build an opensource, federated social network that would compete with Facebook, released its code to developers, having reached a phase where minimal implementation was already possible. The group promised, from the beginning, to set up a site that would be similar to WordPress.com or identi.ca for non-technical people. Even more technical people will not at this stage be able to implement Diaspora on shared hosting, simply because the database chosen is not compatible with most web hosts.

Most tech writers on Diaspora fail to mention, or do not know, that long before Diaspora there was already an opensource, federated social network in the works – not identi.ca – which resembles Twitter – but Appleseed – which, like Diaspora, is of the Facebook mould. Its code is already more advanced than Diaspora, though it hasn’t been as well funded, and it uses a standard LAMP setup. But, as with Diaspora, it doesn’t make too much sense to set up one’s personal social network, or even a “node” of a larger network, unless there are lots of friends.

So while we wait for alternatives to Facebook, we are stuck with it for the time being. There are other networks, but only on Facebook are we likely to find many of our real world friends. But as Facebook grows, so does the discontent of its user base, who come to regard the network as a necessary evil. Many treat it with extreme caution. They are dead right.

The Data Portability Project have come up with the idea of a data portability policy, using the metaphor of the privacy policy which most companies now use.

The idea is not to dictate a given policy, but simply to be open about it. It’s a nice idea: many web sites and companies are not up-front about what data (if any) can be exported from their site and let the users attempt to discover this by themselves. Even companies that in other ways win respect are often guilty of this – for example Opera’s myopera.com social network does not have a mechanism to either export or backup data that is placed there. Does our webmail system allow the download and backup your messages? Does our browser permit us to export bookmarks? How many of us check these things in advance, before beginning to use a product or service?

I don’t know if other people suffer the angst of overchoice and hard decisions about the social media services they will use. There are so many tempting choices, from Posterous, to Buzz, to Twitter, to (of course) Facebook – not to mention the more esoteric ones that I continue to try. The best services are certainly not the most popular ones. Jaiku and identi.ca are more useful than Twitter, for example. Friendfeed is (was) superior in many ways to Facebook.

But despite all, it’s somehow necessary to minimize, and the value of these services is reduced by the lack of participation of friends – so all but those with a large following would move to less popular services. Still, I find it hard to make my mind up.

Twine – another web service that I used for a while – has been closed by its purchaser, Evri. Web-services are fine to use, as long as we don’t become dependent on them. Meanwhile, Sarah Perez says on Buzz that her husband’s gmail account was disabled suddenly without warning. “Wow, had no idea this could even happen. Google just disabled my husband’s Gmail account. No idea why. Maybe it was hacked? Used to send spam? Too bad he just put it on all his business cards. I guess this is what you get for using a free service.”

I’m cutting down on my interaction via my personal profile on Facebook. Earlier today I unsubscribed from all the groups, blanked my profile except for contact information and stopped Twitterfeed from posting there. I’ll continue to read status updates of my friends via Threadsy.  Correction: have to be logged into Facebook for that. And I don’t want to be logged in, since this allows Facebook to track every move we make via the 50,000+ websites that have installed its social plugins.  So I can use Gwibber – Linux’s desktop aggregator.

I didn’t yet find a good alternative to Facebook, but that isn’t sufficient reason to go on using a service that is growing steadily nastier.

“People you follow will see that you are following them and may display their followers on their public profile.”

That means that regardless of how you arrange your privacy settings, you will be visible to the Buzzosphere.

Since your profile name is also your email address, that means that your email address ends up being visible to the world. Gmail does a good job of protecting us from spam, but there are many people who might not want their email address to be publicly known. Google’s solution for that is to give the possibility of using a long unfriendly number. Mine is 117130852944864714190. Recently, the long unfriendly number became also the default for Picasaweb.

It would be nicer if Google could give the possibility of profile nicknames, just like many other services. That would give us 3 options: a) to use the email identifier b) the long unfriendly number and c) a nickname.

I have just accepted a friends request from a 29 year old Indonesian taxi driver. All I know about him is that if he won a million dollars he would travel to California. If I win a million dollars I hereby promise to visit him in Indonesia.

So, my Twitterfeed strategy – once I have it working as I want – is to move the majority of my network activity to my blog on WordPress, and just every few hours to allow a post to go through to the other social networks, in order to keep up a modest presence there, without spamming everyone.

I don’t want to be “owned” by Facebook, Google and Twitter, and for all of my content to be exclusively on those networks. And I want to catch as much as possible of my web activity in one place. At the same time, I want to keep things fairly simple, and not have to worry about complicated relays between networks. I also want to find a single service that allows me read from these networks without visiting them..