Well that didn’t take long — open-source Facebook replacement on the horizon
Interesting lead story in the New York Times right now, about a software startup called Diaspora*.
According to the article, four students decided to try and raise $10,000 to finance themselves while they coded together a social network from scratch. A social network that, unlike Facebook, would be completely open and “privacy aware.”
They gave themselves a month to get the money. Ten days later, they’ve got almost $50,000 — and counting. I’m sure a New York Times profile doesn’t hurt.
On their official blog, they describe Diaspora* as a “distributed network.” This means your own computer hosts your profile — not a giant server farm owned by Facebook or MySpace. Your computer becomes what they call a “seed” and it connects to your friends’ seeds as well.
It’s completely owned by you, and designed to be integrated into existing web services — like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, or even Facebook — but with all the control remaining in your hands.
Scholars of the web will note that this drive towards decentralization seems to be a theme. If Facebook is like Napster, with one main server and a gajillion users, then Diaspora* is perhaps like Bit Torrent.
They’re aiming for a launch in September.
Watch their intro video — and perhaps donate to the project — here.
Anything that destroys Facebook = good.
Surprised you missed THIS part of the story:
http://www.geekosystem.com/dirty-unix-joke-nyt-facebook-nyu/
side note: decentralization is a smart and important trend. Server farms can be terribly inefficient - upgrades can be really expensive, and the more storage is added, the more variables there are for computers to break, a lot of companies try to “risk it” without backup measures…ugh.