Friendika Distributed Social Network http://friendika.com What if there was a social network which was free to use, open source - and where your privacy is always under your control? What if this social network could scale to encompass the entire internet, and *not* require a central organisation to provide servers (in exchange for selling your private information to advertisers)? Look no further. Friendika is a social network without boundaries. 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 connect with and communicate with friends on identi.ca, Status.Net and many other sites and social networks *today*. 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. A single instance of Friendika can easily support hundreds of (and up to several thousand) people using commodity hosting hardware. 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... That's OK too. Friendika may also 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. 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. IMPORTANT: Please see the file INSTALL for system requirements.