Well, with series of complaints being thrown to the social networking site Facebook on the Federal Trade Commission mainly about privacy issues, it looks like people are starting to have less confidence when it comes to social networking sites.
Thus, a group of students from New York University came up with a very timely and good idea to keep people in control of their accounts as well as still allowing social networking. Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Ilya Zhitomirskiy and Raphael Sofaer had come up with an idea of creating a distributed social networking system which will be called Diaspora. The people behind this planned system tagged their project as “a system build as network that allows everyone to install their own seed”.
Diaspora is an open source personal website that puts individual in control of their data. It will allow privacy in whatever they post and share but still giving them the benefits of online social networking. It will be a distributed network wherein separate computers will be connected to each other directly instead of having a central hub to relay information. It will then make the user the total owner of whatever information they share since they will be the one to run everything and not a host or other intermediary. The main goal of this project is to really give the control and full ownership to the user.
The Diaspora project is also somewhat an Anti Facebook campaign by the proponents knowing all the privacy issues being faced by the social networking site. Facebook is known to allow various changing of privacy plans without giving notifications or if they provide. It will consist of lengthy and complicated explanations making the users more at lost.
The proponents of the said project give themselves 39 days to look for funding and raised $10,00 but amazingly with juts 12 days they were already able to have more than of what they plan. With the help of the online fundraising site Kickstarter, the project was able to raise a total of $116,000 and still growing every minute. They were also able to draw big names to their fundraising including VC Fred Wilson and TWiT’s Leo Laporte. The movement indeed had already gathered interest and still gaining steam.
The working on the project will begin this summer. The team plans to make the service available in a few months after the end of summer and once the first solid iteration is produced, a code will be released as free software for anyone who wants to use. Well looks like it will really raise interest to social networking sites fan. As what the team had said, it is not directed toward making users hate the social network, instead they aim to make their use better and safer.
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Tags: diaspora, diaspora overview, open facebook alternative, open facebook project
Please allow me and easily explain how to me, to have a real user name, not my real name.
May I have that much privacy????
Susan
Naaaaaah, terrible name. Gimmicky nonsense