NYU Students Creating Privacy-Controlled Social Net
Thursday, May 13, 2010 by Shep McAllister 
The Diaspora team. Image courtesy of GizmodoIt's no big secret that Facebook has been getting a little creepy lately. Personally I've been pretty apathetic about the whole thing, but a few whiz-kid NYU students decided to do something about it: make their own social network called Diaspora. No big deal or anything.
The open source system aims to put you in control of your privacy by aggregating the entirety of your online identity (Tweets, Facebook updates, YouTube uploads, etc.) on your own computer, rather than Diaspora's servers. These computers (seeds, as they call them) can then connect directly to each other over Diaspora. It's all way over my head, but it sounds pretty neat, right?
Clearly some people like the idea, as the group has already raised over $60,000 $115,000 in donations from Kickstarter.com, and they want to spend the entire summer coding to have the new site ready to go by September. In the meantime you can keep up with them on their blog.
I'm sure we all have tons of friends that complain about all the Facebook privacy changes. Hell, most of you probably do it yourselves. It's pretty cool to see a group of students actually doing something about it. I'm sure their fundraising will go through the roof after getting profiled by Gizmodo, TechCrunch, and The New York Times, but if you like what they're trying to do go ahead and give them some donation love.
Would you be interested in using Diaspora? Talk about it in the comments
Reader Comments (5)
This is an excellent thought provoking post.
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I would really like to see more schools start doing this :)
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Cool idea. Not sure if I would make the switch from big FB though. :)
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