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* Friendika *
*************
- Social Communications Platform
-
- http://friendika.com
-
-
- Since the dawn of the world-wide-web, the internet has been a battleground
-between the "big boys" with all their resources, and a bunch of upstarts whose
-goal is to topple the status quo - and bring the same powers of global reach
-to anybody with a computer and an internet connection.
-
- The latest battleground is social networking. Many of your friends would
-have you believe that the world (and all the information in it) belongs to
-Facebook.
-
- Friendika is here to rock that boat.
-
- Granted, all your friends aren't here - yet. The people who made fun of you
-in high school (yet curiously wanted to be friends with you now) are still
-"poking" each other and managing their virtual farms and telling you all about
-their virtual gang wars. Would you miss them?
-
- I wouldn't.
-
- You probably have a handful of friends that are truly special. Tell those
-friends that the world has changed - because it has. It's time to move on. A
-year ago, if you had left Facebook, there was no place to go - at least a
-place which offered the same kind of social interaction (and wasn't just
-another huge company trying to make money off of all of your private
-information).
-
- Today you have options.
-
- What if there was a social network which provided some of the same
-interaction you've grown to love, *and* was free to use, *and* was open source,
-*and* where your privacy is always under your control?
-
- And what if this social network could scale to encompass the entire
-internet, and *not* require a central organisation - whose core business model
-is to sell information it can discover about you for profit?
-
- Look no further.
-
- Friendika is a social network without boundaries, and without ownership.
-Friendika installations can link together into a global social network which
-is free from central control. Besides the Friendika network (which is privacy
-enhanced); you can also connect with and communicate with friends on identi.ca,
-Status.Net and many other sites and social networks *today*.
-
- Welcome to the federated social web. If you choose not to use Friendika
-(though we think you'd be foolish not to), you can choose any of 20-30 other
-providers of federated social communications software and still be a part of this
-vast new social network. This is going to be bigger than Facebook.
-
- Much bigger.
-
- We are currently developing connectors to seamlessly communicate with many
-other open social networks and providers - like Diaspora, GNU-Social,
-OneSocialWeb, and even some of the larger closed services such as Facebook and
-Twitter.
-
- Over the coming months, the boundaries between these networks will start
-to become indistinguishable as they all become part of your social circle.
-
- Our core belief is that your personal thoughts and conversations belong to
-you - and are only meant to be shared with those you wish to share them with.
-
- Period.
-
- Friendika is secure, and as private as you wish it to be. Our privacy
-settings are straight-forward and simple, because we know that relationships
-rarely are (straight-forward and simple). Whether you're communicating with
-drinking buddies or potential employers, you can rest assured that each is
-only able to see the side of you that you wish to present. If you send a
-private message to your aunt Mary, we will encrypt it with military grade
-encryption.
-
- Friendika delivers. We've got an incredibly rich social communications
-interface you can make use of *right now*.
-
- And lest you think we're just trying to copy Facebook feature-for-feature,
-you couldn't be further from the truth. We like the conversational style
-because it feels natural, and that's why Facebook grew to be what it is today.
-But we're creating something completely different.
-
- Something better.
-
- Start with richer communications. Adorn your text, colour it. We've got a
-text counter in case you're sending across to one of the primitive social
-networks, but we don't think you should have to squeeze your communications
-into some arbitrary limit. Free yourself from thinking how to squeeze your
-message into 140 or 420 characters, or sending messages in some strange
-short-hand code. Even edit your text after you send it. It's OK.
-
- A single instance of Friendika can easily support hundreds of (and up to
-several thousand) people using commodity hosting hardware. You could even run
-Friendika on an old PC in your closet or garage. Each of these people are able
-to connect with potentially hundreds or thousands of friends and associates
-on any other supported network anywhere in the world and share photos, links,
-status updates, etc.
-
- But maybe you don't want to be connected to the world... and that's OK
-too. Friendika may be closed off from the global community and used to support
-social networking amongst corporate, educational, religious, and other private
-communities. This makes it an excellent choice for the social networking needs
-of young teenagers and especially k-12 organisations.
-
- Every person on Friendika has unlimited profiles available to them. There
-is a "public profile" which can be seen by anybody. Additional profiles may be
-tailored to specific groups or individuals. Try doing that on Twitter.
-
- Groups may be created and used for closed conversations. In this way your
-conversations with one group of friends is completely isolated from other
-friends or groups of friends.
-
- You may also create interactive band/celebrity pages, special interest
-groups, and even organisational 'soapboxes' - for social communications that
-require the ability to scale to global levels. Friendika provides for automatic
-relationship management in these extreme cases so that you can concentrate on
-your message and public persona - and not worry about being swamped by friend
-requests. You can even maintain private social contact with your closest
-friends and public updates to your hordes of fans - using the same interface.
-
- No other social network offers this ability.
+ Friendika Communications Server
+ http://project.friendika.com
+
+
+ Friendika is a web application for managing social communications. Some
+would call it a "social network" or "distributed social network". We think
+both terms have been over-used and don't really apply - though Friendika can
+also fill those roles.
+
+ At its essence, Friendika is a web application which can monitor various
+information streams, and also let you participate in online conversations with
+friends and associates using a variety of network protocols.
+
+ Friendika also manages your personal profiles and photo albums and lets
+you tailor either of these to specific audiences. Your communications can be
+either open and public, or closed and private. You can easily create "groups"
+of contacts with which you can partition your conversations into social
+circles.
+
+ Friendika is decentralised. Any account on any Friendika server can connect
+with any other Friendika account on any other server. You can also connect to
+friends on Status.Net and other federated social web services (e.g. identi.ca,
+GNU-Social, etc.).
+
+ Outgoing communications can be directed at these networks and/or your
+existing accounts on Facebook and Twitter - and even delivered to email
+contacts.
+
+ Incoming data streams aren't limited to traditional social networks.
+They may include most any service that provide a syndication feed (both RSS
+and Atom). This allows you to view communications from friends in other
+diverse social networks - such as Diaspora, Google Buzz, and millions of
+Wordpress blogs, news services, and other websites. Over time we will try to
+build two-way bridges to many of these services so that you can freely
+interact in both directions with anybody who allows it.
+
+ Communications between supported networks are private and encrypted,
+using military grade encryption - and require mutual authentication of servers
+before any data is exchanged.
+
+ Friendika has no boundaries and no central ownership. Anybody with a
+commodity PHP/MySQL web server can provide a membership hub, and each
+individual server can then support several thousand participating members
+- each with their own unique communication and privacy needs.
+
+ If you are creating a website which requires social interaction, Friendika
+can take the place of blog software, forum software and feed readers, and
+also provide individualised communications and content management - or
+provide a ready alternative to traditional "monolithic" social networks.
Join us.
+ Find out more about the project at http://project.friendika.com
+
*******************
Friendika Demo Site
*******************