Diaspora distributed social network vs Drupal: re-inventing the wheel?

Drupal is a generic CMS; it can be used to build corporate websites, government websites, entertainment portals, and of course social networking sites. Diaspora on the other hand is vying to be a social networking 'platform' (or at least it should be ... if it wants to be anything like Facebook).

Yes, with some effort, one would be able to create something like Diaspora with Drupal, and certainly it won't be a surprise if they [Diaspora guys] do use Drupal (or some other framework, CodeIgniter, for example) as a base for Diaspora.

And since Drupal is open source, and they are planning to make Diaspora open source as well, so they can really use Drupal as a base without worrying about the licensing and stuff.

They are using Ruby; so they won't be using Drupal. They seem to have a huge number of followers and investors though. They say by September 2010 there will be basically a release of the software. It will be AGPL. I am interested and am going to keep tabs on what they are doing.

It is interesting that they went the ruby route, since facebook is php based.

Anyone else have any other information on diaspora?

Taking look at it more and watching videos about it, I don't think it's going to be a piece of open source software for companies and individuals to build online communities or social networks, where you can download drupal, or joomla, or wordpress, or elgg, or pligg, or lovd by less,or dolphin....etc, and make a website out of it, no.

Each individual person...the average joe, downloads Diaspora. They either use it on their computer, or have to host it somewhere. I am not exactly sure because they say its sort of like p2p in a way, but then they also say they will come out with a turnkey hosted service for a monthly fee.

Pretty confusing, and they don't really give many details about it.

I think a Drupal version would be better. (Maybe that's my bias talking,) but it would at least be worth a shot.

How would we go about doing it though?

I'd see it as a social networking install profile, that speaks to other drupal installs, through a protocol like Bittorrent.

So really, all we'd have to do is make a slick, user friendly install profile (that would also automatically install a LAMP/WAMP server with MySql), a module for the Bittorrent-like communication, a catchy name, some good documentation, a solid and familiar base theme (think Facebook style,) a color selector theme, and a framework in which others could easy create their own themes (think PimpMyMyspace editors.)

The hardest part would probably be creating the Bittorrent-like module, and packing up the install so that grandma can do it.

What do you guys think?

Now I really don't think it is going to go anywhere or be anything great.