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Diaspora Anti-Facebook Project
Have or most likely, can you, ever imagine your world without Facebook? If the answer is yes, then you probably are not a Facebookaholic but if you are one, do you really feel that FB cares about your privacy or more importantly are you yourself satisfied by it? Facebook is a social-network cum sharing platform where you post your ideas, pictures and everything you want to share and here you lose your privacy. But what if there was something different or something better than Facebook that not only keeps you connected to your loved ones but also gives you control over what you share and with whom you share.
That’s the idea behind this new Diaspora project, a passionate undertaking to build an “anti-Facebook” social network that is open-source, private and gives you full control over your personal data. Envisioned by four NYU computer science students, the Diaspora project will replace today’s centralized social web network or more likely as we know it “Facebook” with a much private, decentralized one that puts you back in-control of your personal data.
According to the project’s homepage, the students, Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, while bonding late nights over developing a “Makerbot” (that’s a kind of robot) and ended up discussing over how a distributed social web network would look like. This led to the idea and development of “Diaspora”, a new, distributed social network.
The project which was hosted on kickstarter.com, a social web based fund raising platform that makes creative idea turn to reality by letting entrepreneurs and other creative-types fund the project. Kickstarter creates project goals and deadlines and also gives optional set of rewards for project backers, that helps in fund-raising of projects. According to the website, the project goal of $10000 was shattered when the idea received a mesmerizing response from thousands of similarly-thinking people and collected over $200,000.
So what is DIASPORA anyways and how is going to SAVE ME?
Diaspora as I stated before is “decentralized” form of social web network and why I focus so much on “decentralized” is because it is this feature that makes it much more “private”. Instead of having a singular portal like Facebook to connect various people, Diaspora is a distributed network where many computers connect and share directly. Once set up, the network would aggregate you information and also import things like tweets, RSS feeds similar to what FriendFeed does.
When you send friend requests to other users or are actually friends, the network establishes connection between the two of you so you can chat and share directly. This means you are two computers talking directly unlike through a central server like Facebook.
Since, most people will be more interested in shutting down their computers rather than keeping it on for “seeding” as you would do in torrents, there are plans to offer paid turn-key service similar to wordpress.com so that the network is always online like Facebook.
The Diaspora project is all set up and ready-to-go and here’s the link joindiaspora
Although the team is only sending invites right now, the main website will be fully functional over a short period of time. You can check for updates here http://blog.joindiaspora.com
