JoinDiaspora.com - A social networking project for people to control their info
Keeping your private data private on the social web
Diaspora is the brainchild of four students at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. They're building a new social networking project that they describe as "an open source personal web server that will put individuals in control of their data."
Maxwell Salzberg, Daniel Grippi, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy publicized their project in April 2010, and asked the public for support. They exceeded their $10,000 goal in just 12 days. Subsequent publicity pushed their backing to more than $170,000 by mid-April.
The four partners say their distributed network will connect people's individual computers into a social network. Each person's own computer will hold their Facebook profile, tweets, photographs and other personal data so that every person controls access to his or her own data.
The project was born when the four students listened to Columbia law professor Eben Moglen talk about how easily people are sacrificing the privacy of their personal information to the convenience of using web-hosted social networks and other web-based services.
Grippi, Salzberg, Sofaer and Zhitomirskiy decided to create technology that would allow anyone to store all their personal information in a secure "seed" and then network to anyone else's seed to enable sharing the same things people now share at Facebook and other social sites: photos, video, messages and other data.
The four partners plan to offer the social networking software they develop for free. They might also offer an enhanced, paid version, in much the same way that WordPress.com offers a free blogging platform, while WordPress.org offers a commercial version that's more powerful. They've promised to release a working version of their software by the end of summer 2010.
Making a fundraising splash in the investment Diaspora
In mid-April 2010, the Diaspora partners launched a fundraising effort on Kickstarter, a site that enables entrepreneurs to raise money for their projects.
The partners said they wanted to raise $10,000 by June 1, 2010. By mid-May, they'd raised more than $170,000 from more than 4,000 people. It's a testament to how much company they have in their desire to share online while retaining control of one's own personal data.
Diaspora: Attracting attention all over
Grippi, Salzberg, Sofaer and Zhitomirskiy have attracted notice all over, including a feature article in The New York Times that likely boosted contributions to their funding campaign. Bloggers around the Internet -- including top sites such as ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch -- have latched onto the project, analyzing, praising and dissing it as "for geeks only."
Press for Diaspora
- ReadWriteWeb's Diaspora post
- TechCrunch's Diaspora piece
- The New York Times Diaspora article
- Tyler Romeo's Diaspora post
Diaspora on the social web
Despite their dissatisfaction with the current social web, you can follow Diaspora on:
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: [}}} Facebook] - The Diaspora blog
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: @JoinDiaspora - On the open microblogging network
@joindiaspora
Contact
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