The Diaspora social network is a new project in progress being developed by a group of four New York University students named Daniel Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Ilya Zhitomirskiy and Raphael Sofaer.
Their brainchild, entitled Diaspora, started the journey to become a reality in summer 2010 when the group of programmers began their project once classes ended. Diaspora defines themselves on their website, as "Diaspora: the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network".
The developers of Diaspora hold a shared vision to create and develop an open source social network that allows members to be in control of their personal information.
The planned social network is intended to be designed as a way to give individuals control over their personal information without being subjected to changing privacy policies and sell-outs to third parties.
The project is described as 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).
In a time where Facebook is being highly criticized, has reports filed against them with the FTC, a movement calling for people to quit Facebook, and essentially being called to task regarding their evolving door of privacy policy changes, Diaspora chooses an ideal time to promote and release ideas for their project.
Ideal indeed, many financial backers, big and small, are apparently stepping up to the plate to help fund this idea. The four entrepreneurs had publicly asked for financial support on the online fund-raising website, Kickstarter, and received an incredible and rapid response.
Diaspora's initial goal was to raise $10,000 by June 1 so the programmers could begin the project, but that goal was quickly reached and surpassed by more than 10x only 12 days later. As of May 17, 2010 there are almost 4,800 backers with a total of approximately $175,000 pledge, and these figures steadily growing.
Not bad of a financial start to develop and turn into reality an envisioned new network.
It is far too soon to tell whether Diaspora will lure enough people away from Facebook and become the next top social networking website, however due to the ripe timing and tremendous amount of support, it might just have a shot.
To the probable chagrin of Facebook, it turns out people actually value their privacy, and Facebook's apparent lack of regard for their members' personal information may be the networking giant's downfall. Only time will tell. This could just as easily blow over, and depending on how the tide turns on this will likely impact whether or not Diaspora garners a large population of the web in their membership.
Innovation is what drives the trends on the web and it will be interesting to see how far Diaspora comes along and whether or not people will leave Facebook. It is not going to be an easy feat to lure 500 million plus members. Then on the other hand Facebook did end up surpassing MySpace, who replaced something else.
The web thrives on rapid change and as privacy concerns continue to rise and Diaspora maintains their pledge to protect what people deem valuable, they just might have a good chance against Facebook.
Stay tuned.
To learn more about Diaspora and follow development progress, you can visit http://www.joindiaspora.com/.
Sources:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/196307/facebooks_batt ering_good_for_competition.html
http://mashable.com/2010/05/13/diaspora/
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/12/diaspora-open-faceb ook-project/