Students debut open source social network

Four students from the New York University Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences are building an open sourced social network, says Network World.

The Diaspora project aims to create a social network where users own their data, not the network. The concept tackles the two largest complaints about Facebook: privacy and customisation.

More than 1 200 people have pledged to fund the project on Kickstart, with a value of $42 000 by Wednesday.

Yahoo! unveiled plans that it will open source its internal cloud serving platform, writes The Register.

The platform has been described as something between Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the Google App Engine. The solution currently provides Yahoo developers with on-demand access to computing resources. But rather than offering virtual machines as Amazon EC2 does, it uses that are 'containers' of server power.

The company says its current plan is to open source the platform early in 2011.

Symbian has released the availability of its Web application development tools, writes SDTimes.

The open source tools are built on top of the Eclipse JavaScript Debug Toolkit project to add mobile-specific development. The capabilities include mobile application previewing, debugging, project creation and mobile API support.

The tools allow Web developers to apply their existing skills to create applications for the open sourced Symbian 3 OS.