Diaspora Is Coming To A Theater Near You
Thursday, May 13, 2010, 7:53 AM | 1 Comment
I very seldom connect on FaceBook. I just didn’t have the nerve to register.
Quite a number of folks are said to have some issues with the social network where people are forced to surrender their privacy to a big business.
Four guys from New York University listened and started to build a software package that would be distributed free. Folks should be able to communicate online without the privacy issues.
They call it Diaspora*.
Their motto is “the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.” They intend to make the code openly available so that other programmers can build on it.
As against FaceBook, Diaspora* software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share, according to a press release by the four developers.
The four are going to face FaceBook head on. Let’s face it. The popular social network is a centralized network where folks hand their messages to a hub. You swap personal information for convenient access to sites, thereby collecting ever more information about the users, just like spies but for free. That information can be sold to marketers. The demand for a social network that gives users control seems to be strong.
Diaspora* website states
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.
In a Nutshell
I don’t remember what motto FaceBook carried when it first started. We just have to see how Diaspora can keep its promises. Only the young are able to solve the social network problems. The over 50 have to just sit on the sideline and let the kids do what they wanna do.
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