GNU social, a free software social network, is built on-top of the successful StatusNet codebase, that contains significant contributions from GNU social developer, Craig Andrews.

Matt Lee, project founder was interviewed in iTWire about the project and attended the Federated Social Web summit and met with other developers interested in distributed services like GNU social, including the Appleseed and Diaspora projects.

To celebrate the release of GNU social's alpha, buttons are now available to help raise funds for the project.

The project is now seeking alpha testers and is looking to find free software friendly ISPs and hosting companies to help set up a vast network of GNU social sites for the general public, as well as offering paid GNU social hosting for those who are interested — support@foocorp.net.

Additionally, GNU social is holding a design contest for new themes for the software, announced by Tim Berners-Lee — and encourages all web designers to help improve the user experience of GNU social.