Diaspora II

Posted by Richard Thomas on 13 May 2010 | 0 Comments

Tags: Diaspora, social network, open source, facebook

Here are the links to a couple of articles on the Diaspora project I contributed financially to:

New York Times: Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook. How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it? A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on.

Link to NYT article

Wired: NYU Students Aim to Invent Facebook (Again). We’ve Got Your Back. Remember when Facebook really was a private club? In the days before we called anything a “social network?” When “sharing” and “connecting” wasn’t bait for the switch of “monetizing” the stuff and nonsense of our lives? Well, four NYU students do, and they are so nostalgic for those halcyon days way back in 2004 that they have set out to re-invent that wheel — for the good of mankind. The New York Times reports Wednesday that Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 20; Dan Grippi, 21; Max Salzberg, 22; and Raphael Sofaer, 19, decided that Facebook had become so … Facebook that the world needed a safe online haven, one that could fulfill what had once been the fact and promise of Facebook. A place secure from the Big Bad Wolves who walk right though an open door to cull, scrape, decipher and analyze our timelines, and who see a commercial opportunity every time we go for coffee, buy a movie ticket or change partners.

Link to Wired article