Yep, a “free distributed & privacy aware & personally control” social network is about to begin… should Facebook be afraid…?
Wow, in barely 2 days Maxwell, Daniel, Raphael and Ilya (the 4 NYU students) have seen how their “diaspora” social network project has become a complete viral phenomenon being reviewed by a long list of sites such as The New York Times or Gizmodo…. (and uz of corz). They needed $10.000 before the 1st June to code all summer…. today (19 days b4 the end of the fundraising) they have more than $113.000 …!!!
They deserve it (if they manage to materialize diaspora)…. and this is how it works…
“What is it?
Enter your Diaspora “seed,” a personal web server that stores all of your information and shares it with your friends. Diaspora knows how to securely share (using GPG) your pictures, videos, and more. When you have a Diaspora seed of your own, you own your social graph, you have access to your information however you want, whenever you want, and you have full control of your online identity. Once we have built a solid foundation, we will make Diaspora easy to extend to facilitate any type of communication, and the possibilities will be endless.
What is the project about?
We believe that privacy and connectedness do not have to be mutually exclusive. With Diaspora, we are reclaiming our data, securing our social connections, and making it easy to share on your own terms. We think we can replace today’s centralized social web with a more secure and convenient decentralized network. Diaspora will be easy to use, and it will be centered on you instead of a faceless hub.
Why are we building it?
This February, Eben Moglen, Columbia law professor and author of the latest GPL, gave a talk on Internet privacy. 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.
But why is centralization so much more convenient, even in an age where relatively powerful computers are ubiquitous? Why is there no good alternative to centralized services that, as Moglen pointed out, comes with “spying for free?” Why do we keep our personal data in a thousand places? We have the technology, someone just needs to take the time to figure out how we can communicate smoothly and intuitively, without the hidden costs of “the cloud”. As good programmers, when we noticed that the application we need doesn’t exist, we set out to fill the hole in our digital lives.”
Ok so, now we’re gonna give them a few months before start evaluating, scrutinizing & testing…. we’ll keep an eye on you four! 😉
