*********
    Friendika
    *********

    Distributed Social Network

    http://friendika.com

Did you ever wonder what might happen if you ever left Facebook? 

What if there was a social network which provided some of the same interaction 
you've grown to love, *and* was free to use, open source - and where your 
privacy is always under your control? 

And 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. If you send a private message to 
your aunt Mary, we encrypt it with military grade encryption. Other social 
networks talk about privacy and offering a feature-rich social networking 
alternative, but Friendika delivers. Time and time again.   

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.