If you haven't heard already, there's a storm brewing on the distributed social web and it's being lead by a few hackers in Portland. They're building a distributed social app in response to the public interest for alternatives to centralized servers. They've taken the concept of Diaspora and hacked together their own vision of an interface and CouchDB back end. I spotted the git repo on Tuesday morning while waiting for my wife to get out of a minor surgery (she's fine). There are three active contributors to the project already, and I'm anxious to find a place to chip in.
Quick Repo Tracking on GitHub
As I've mentioned before Max Ogden's couchappspora repo is the first I came across, and he's the project lead/code merger. Jesse Hallet has made a number of commits to another fork of the app. Tyler Gillies is hacking away at his fork and debugging pubsubhubbub implementation this morning. I can see Tyler's tests on twitter, and just now he posted realtime federation is live. The app currently takes remote status.net compliant messages and posts them to couchappspora, but the reverse isn't built yet.
These guys are all talented PDX hackers so I expect rapid feature development and to learn a bunch from keeping track of the code changes.