Tired of Facebook? There’s a Diaspora* for that
Thursday, May 13th, 2010It’s looking like there’s enough of a growing backlash of Facebook users who are concerned for their privacy, that an open-source challenger is being developed.
Profiled in the New York Times, Diaspora* is promoting itself as a locally grown social media platform. The idea behind the new platform is to answer (or even fix) privacy concerns Facebook users are bringing up, plus allowing a distributed approach to social data. (A recent Wired article delves into Facebook’s changing privacy model.)
Installing what the four-man team of developers call “seeds,” users will collect and combine whatever data you want to feed it, but with more control over who gets to see what. You can still have your Facebook account and your own Twitter feed, but via Diaspora* you have a more customized approach to pushing that data to other users.
So how popular is the idea? The team’s funding goal was $10,000, which was met in 12 days. As of May 13, they were up to a shade over $90,000, backed by over 2,100 donors.
The Diaspora* team is aiming for a September launch.