Last winter, I wrote in this space about Diaspora*, a new free software-based, decentralized, privacy-aware social networking service developed by four computer science students at New York University.

At the time, Diaspora* was in the very early "alpha" stage of development and access to the service was by invitation only.

Right now, there are probably a couple of dozen "Pods" (servers) up and running on the Net and for all intents and purposes, Diaspora* is open for business!

What's different about Diaspora*?