New free network services

To recap: In March 2008, some of our associate members met up during our conference and spoke about what free network services would look like. They came up with a document for discussion, the Franklin Street Statement, named after the street address of the FSF offices, here in Boston.

Since then, a number of free network services have arrived. Previously, we spoke about Identi.ca. The founder of Identi.ca, Evan Prodromou, came to Boston for our LibrePlanet 2009 conference and spoke about some of the challenges in building the system. Here's an update on a few more services that have sprung up since then:

Libre.fm: Spurred on by a discussion at the conference, I and a few other free software hackers have been working on a free software replacement for another of these Web 2.0 sites. Libre.fm, a free software replacement for the music site Last.fm, was born at the very end of March 2009. In the last two months, we've provided a scraping tool for users to get their data out of Last.fm, as well as replacements for both the server and Web components. At the time of writing, Libre.fm has just under 9 million tracks in its database, of which approximiately 1.5 million are unique. All this, from just under 11,000 users in a little over 8 weeks.

Identi.ca: After continuing success with Identi.ca, Evan has raised funding for the project and has hired some developers to work on the service.

Filmaster: Filmaster is a new social network for movie fans featuring personalized content and recommendations. Filmaster allows you to run your own movie blog, rate movies and talk about movies with people whose opinions you care about. They've created a place for real movie freaks -- people for whom film is not just entertainment.

We hope to have a full interview with the developers of Filmaster in the next issue of the Bulletin.