by Leigh Goessl

Created on: May 13, 2010   Last Updated: May 14, 2010

As more members in the online community become painfully aware of the privacy implications of posting and sharing personal information on social networks, four New York University students are hoping to provide a solution to this increasingly growing concern.

The group of programmers, Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Ilya Zhitomirskiy and Raphael Sofaer, hold a firm belief that privacy and sharing information should not be exclusive. Unfortunately the opposite seems to exist in current online networking models and many users are becoming disenchanted.

Their brainchild, Diaspora, is a vision the students are hoping to create and develop "an open source personal web service that will put individuals in control of their data", or essentially the anti-Facebook" (Mashable.com).

Members of websites, such as Facebook, are held to continuously changing privacy policies with often no notification. Or if changes are announced, members are presented with lengthy explanations and instructions for opting out of changes that are just as complicated. To date multiple complaints are being registered with the Federal Trade Commission against Facebook.

Diaspora is intended to be developed as a way to give control back to users who still want to be involved with the benefits of online social networking. The project is described as " build is a network that allows everyone to install their own “seed” — i.e. a personal web server with a user’s photos, videos and everything else — within the larger network. That seed would be fully owned and controlled by the user, so the user could share anything and still maintain ownership over it". (Mashable.com).

It is often said timing is everything. With so much controversy currently surrounding Facebook and streamed in the news, the four students have picked a ripe time to look to move forward with their project and gather support and financial backing.

The industrious students decided to put this idea into action and try and raise funding for their project. Their initial goal was to raise $10,000 by June 1 so they could strive towards bringing their idea to fruition. The group quickly reached and surpassed that goal in only 12 days.

As of May 13, 2010 the four hopefuls raised in excess of $116,000 with the aid of the online fundraising website, Kickstarter,  gained about 3,000 supporters by this date. Numbers are still steadily growing.

Quite a nice sum and number of supporters to get their idea rolling. Apparently this is an idea that is grabbing a lot of attention.

It will be interesting to see if and how this project comes to fruition and takes off. Will people really leave Facebook which has multi-million members or will this project simply fade into oblivion?

Innovation is what drives popular networks on the web. Years ago who would have thought the old America Online bulletin boards would have fallen so low in popularity in favor of the Web 2.0? That MySpace would be replaced by Facebook as the number one social network?

When it comes to technology change is inevitable and pretty fast paced. Considering the web is a continuous evolution of products, if privacy concerns consider to rise, Diaspora might just soar in popularity.

Only time will tell.

To learn more about this product and follow progress, you can visit http://www.joindiaspora.com/.

Sources:

http://mashable.com/2010/05/13/diaspora/

http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/12/diaspora-open-faceb ook-project/

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