[/caption]When earlier this year Facebook was being attacked by many people for its privacy failures, a group of students from NYU decided that they would try to build an open source social network that would be private and secure. They decided to get funding through Kickstarter. Their need funding was $10,000, they ended up getting over $100,000. This enabled them to have as much money as they needed and a lot more to make a really great platform. It's been in development for a while now and its first developer release is now available.
At first, people were skeptical that Diaspora (the social network) would succeed. It got the funding and also some initial press coverage, however, many people didn't believe that a group of students could actually ship a functioning product. However, now it seems that people had no reason to be skeptical. The product is there, and the demand is there too.
Diaspora is billed as "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network." Their key marketing strategy is the privacy control. That is what is making people want it. Facebook's privacy controls just keep getting more complicated, so a secure network like Diaspora is very welcome.
Diaspora will not be hosted on a central server, rather, its creators encision Diaspora as being installed on computers across the world in a distributed network--sort of like a BitTorrent for social networking--this would enable people to have their own sort of network.
This release of Diaspora is the first developer release. The team points out that it's hardly bug-free or complete. However, it does include the main features that they originally wanted.
There's still a ways to go for Diaspora before it can truly be called a Facebook competitor, however, when it does come out as a fully functioning public release, we will be quick to try it out.
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