Four US students have gives their first glimpse of a community-funded and open alternative to Facebook, called "Diaspora".

The developers today released the source code for Diaspora, which is desdcribed as "a community project and development is open to anyone with the technical expertise who shares the vision of a social network that puts users in control."

Diaspora was conceived earlier this year by four US students during a period when Facebook came under fire for its privacy settings.

The developing team began the summer a list of technologies, and a few bold claims and their goal was "to make an intrinsically more private social network."

"We live our real lives in context, speaking from whatever aspect of ourselves that those around us know, "teh team wrote at its blog. "Social tools should work the same way. Getting the source into the hands of developers is our first experiment in making a simple and functional tool for contextual sharing. Diaspora is in its infancy, but our initial ideas are there."

Diaspora is currently under development and allows users to share status messages and photos privately and in near real time. User scan also upload o photos and albums and all the traffic is signed and encrypted (except photos, for now).

The team said they are currently working to integrate the site with Facebook and to make it easy for people to take control of and move their personal data. They aim to launch the first public product in October.