Diaspora - the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network

This newly announced project is featured in New York Times on May 12 - "Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook". First line of the article says "How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it?".

Almost all social network services presenting today are centralized, such as Facebook, Twitter, Orkut etc. we fill out personal information to register as an user, hand over messages via their servers to communicate with our friends. In the mean while, what we are giving up is all of our own privacy. That may increase data leakage and we have to be more cautious about what we are posting on these social networks.

A few months back, four geeky college students of NYU (Mr. Salzberg and Mr. Grippi are Raphael Sofaer, 19, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 20), decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business in exchange for convenient access to their sites. They have called their project Diaspora and intend to distribute the software free, and to make the code openly available so that other programmers can build on it.

The Diaspora group was inspired to begin their project after hearing a talk about "internet privacy" by Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University. As more and more of our lives and identities become digitized, Moglen explains, the convenience of putting all of our information in the hands of companies on “the cloud” is training us to casually sacrifice our privacy and fragment our online identities. Why is there no good alternative to centralized services that, as Moglen pointed out, comes with "spying for free?”

“When you give up that data, you’re giving it up forever”

“In our real lives, we talk to each other, We don’t need to hand our messages to a hub."

"Our real social lives do not have central managers, and our virtual lives do not need them." — said by Diaspora group.

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".

It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on. They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000, using an online site, Kickstarter, that helps creative people find support. They announced their project on April 24. They reached their $10,000 goal in 12 days, and the money continues to come in: as of today (May 24), they had raised over $180,000

Not bad for a financial start to turning an envisioned new network into reality. It is far too soon to tell whether Diaspora will replace 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.