500 million users and growing, Facebook leads the way in social networking. But time and again, Facebook had to face fire from many privacy groups. Even this week, Facebook was very much in the news, when profile data of more than 10 million Facebook users surfaced on an torrent site.
Networkworld reports that four students, Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Soafer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy of New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences are already on their way to release a decentralized and open source alternative to Facebook called Diaspora, that will give users full control over their privacy.
According to the developers, Diaspora is the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.
“We believe that privacy and connectedness do not have to be mutually exclusive. With Diaspora, we are reclaiming our data, securing our social connections, and making it easy to share on your own terms. We think we can replace today’s centralized social web with a more secure and convenient decentralized network. Diaspora will be easy to use, and it will be centered on you instead of a faceless hub,” says the description about the project on it’s Web site.
This Diaspora project began after they were inspired by Eben Moglen’s, director-counsel and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), talk on privacy on the ‘Net.
This four young and talented programmers also managed to raise their goal of $10,000 for the project, within six weeks of posting the project on April 25 with almost 6500 backers pledging a total of $200,641 according to the project’s website.
In regards to privacy on Facebook, we have three groups of users – users who are not satisfied by the way privacy is handled, users who are indifferent to their privacy for the services provided, and lastly, the ones who doesn’t know any better.
How this new service will effect Facebook and it’s usage will be known when the first iteration (which they aim to) launch in September.
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Your site sounds promising. I would like to suggest that at least one person proofread material that is representative of Diaspora because there are several grammatical errors in the above text. Good luck, I hope Diaspora goes viral.