Diaspora
I have been using the Diaspora alpha in a very lazy way.
Since it automatically feeds to RSS if you make an entry public to the world, I'm doing twitter-like things on this feed: http://joindiaspora.com/public/flit if you are madly interested in what kind of tea I am drinking. The feed is kind of slow to update still but it gets there eventually.
I have some invites if anyone is interested. It's in alpha, so bear that in mind. It's a very functional alpha but it's still pretty bare-bones.
One of the things I really like about it is that you add people to "aspects" and you can add the same person to multiple aspects. Aspects are whatever you like, though are generally used to to separate parts of your life, so I could have a "gaming" aspect and then add only gamers to it and spare my family members any gaming posts unless they were interested in it. (In which case I could add them to the gaming aspect as well.) This ability to compartmentalize allows people to separate different parts of their lives, pretty crucial for people who need separation between business and leisure personas. It isn't quite the same as friend groups in Livejournal but I can see using it in a similar way. Anyhow it does effortlessly (both for posting filters and for reading filters) something that was undoable in Facebook, so I'm quite pleased. I'd definitely love to see a viable Facebook alternative, and so far Diaspora has had both the right approach to privacy and the right approach to openness... it's easy on both sides, and it's easy to see where exactly your data is going.
Since it automatically feeds to RSS if you make an entry public to the world, I'm doing twitter-like things on this feed: http://joindiaspora.com/public/flit if you are madly interested in what kind of tea I am drinking. The feed is kind of slow to update still but it gets there eventually.
I have some invites if anyone is interested. It's in alpha, so bear that in mind. It's a very functional alpha but it's still pretty bare-bones.
One of the things I really like about it is that you add people to "aspects" and you can add the same person to multiple aspects. Aspects are whatever you like, though are generally used to to separate parts of your life, so I could have a "gaming" aspect and then add only gamers to it and spare my family members any gaming posts unless they were interested in it. (In which case I could add them to the gaming aspect as well.) This ability to compartmentalize allows people to separate different parts of their lives, pretty crucial for people who need separation between business and leisure personas. It isn't quite the same as friend groups in Livejournal but I can see using it in a similar way. Anyhow it does effortlessly (both for posting filters and for reading filters) something that was undoable in Facebook, so I'm quite pleased. I'd definitely love to see a viable Facebook alternative, and so far Diaspora has had both the right approach to privacy and the right approach to openness... it's easy on both sides, and it's easy to see where exactly your data is going.