Diaspora goes live

Diaspora, a widely anticipated social network site built on open-source code, has cracked open its doors for business, at least for a handful of invited participants, writes PC World.

"Every week, we'll invite more people," wrote the developers behind the project, in a blog item revealing the alpha release of the service. "By taking these baby steps, we'll be able to quickly identify performance problems and iterate on features as quickly as possible."

While Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg may not be worried about Diaspora quite yet, the service is one of a growing number of efforts to build out open-source-based social-networking software and services, the report says. Others include Identica, a Twitter-like messaging service built on open-source software, and the Free Software Foundation's GNU Social.

Open source programmers who have been working to keep Google Wave alive hit a significant milestone by submitting their open source Wave code to the Apache Software Foundation, says VentureBeat.

After a rocky start and apparent difficulties in convincing users to try it out, Google said it ended development on its much-hyped Wave collaboration tool back in August. Google Maps and Wave creator Lars Rasmussen has since joined Facebook.

Most well-known for the popular Apache Web server, the Apache Foundation is home to nearly 100 open source projects. The Google Wave team previously revealed that it was working on open sourcing the defunct service by combining the Wave server and client into something called 'Wave in a Box'.

When Oliver Kreylos, a computer scientist, heard about the capabilities of Microsoft's new Kinect gaming device, he couldn't wait to get his hands on it, but had no interest in playing video games with the Kinect, which is meant to be plugged into an Xbox and allows players to control the action onscreen by moving their bodies, states The New York Times.

Kreylos, who specialises in virtual reality and 3D graphics, had just learned that he could download some software and use the device with his computer instead. He was soon using it to create 'holographic' video images that can be rotated on a computer screen. A video he posted on YouTube last week caused jaws to drop and has been watched 1.3 million times.

Kreylos is part of a crowd of programmers, roboticists and tinkerers who are getting the Kinect to do things it was not really meant to do. The attraction of the device is that it is outfitted with cameras, sensors and software that let it detect movement, depth, and the shape and position of the human body.