You can now have a Social Network of your own

I'm greatly impressed by the effort of the 2 geeks in building the framework called "NoseRub". It is a de-centralized white-label social network that supports basic content types like media, links, micropublishing and text.

Each of us have a blog of our own, then why not have a social network of our own too... NoseRub is an effort to fill that space. This light-weight social network will display a lifestream of our online activity, track friends from various other networks, and make quick notes to the web.

You always have full control of your data & layout, as you can install NoseRub on your own server and have it connect to other servers out there. Check out this page for a walkthrough using screenshots. Btw, its free and open-source.

Are you wondering what de-centralized means...? Here is an explanation from its founder:

NoseRub is not only a social network aggregator, but claims to be decentralised. What does this mean? You can install NoseRub on your own server and let it connect with your friends NoseRub server, or with hosted NoseRub servers. A good similarity is wordpress. You can either host your blog at wordpress.com, or install the software from wordpress.org on your own server.

Example: I have an account on a NoseRub framework running on my server, and you may have yours on your server. I will still be able to add you as a friend and communicate seamlessly with your account.

I'm also impressed at how it makes use of FOAF micro-format to store information and communicate with other NoseRub servers. FOAF provides a RDF/XML format for downloading profile and relationship data, and is a project under the umbrella of Semantic Web. Great work by NoseRub folks!

Update: A similar approach taken by SixApart is worth watching out for. They just announced the upcoming launch of "open social graph". Also checkout this huge news on Google's Open API plans.