Diaspora, the Anti-Facebook Set to Debut September 15th
The anti-Facebook is coming. Diaspora, an open source social network designed to challenge the mighty Facebook, will launch on September 15th its creators say.
The developers describe their new site as “privacy-aware, personally-controlled” social network.
The project first made headlines earlier this year when Facebook was coming under fire about its privacy policies and the use of member’s information. Facebook’s privacy settings were criticized for being over complicated and hard to understand. They have since been overhauled and simplified.
The furor however gained publicity for the Diaspora project which is headed by three computer scientists and a mathematician- Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy-all from New York. Seeking funding the group turned to the fund raising site Kickstarter in an attempt to raise $10,000, the amount they believed they needed to get the site off the ground.
In the end they ended up with $200,642 donated by about 6,500 different people. One of those people is rumored to have been Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and co-creator of Facebook.
On their official blog the team posted the news about the impending launch on Thursday. “Dear Internet” the post reads “Since August is nearly over, it is time for an update and answers to some questions. We have been coding. We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th.”
The initial release on 15 September will be to “open-source” Diaspora, which means that the development team will make the underlying code available for anyone to see and modify.
Challenging Facebook’s dominance though will be extremely difficult. The site has over 500 million users and said to be worth about $33 billion dollars. According to Alexa, a company who track website rankings, a full 35% of worldwide internet users access Facebook on a daily basis and its traffic rank is second only to Google.
Posted in Tech | Tagged anti facebook, diaspora, diaspora launch, Facebook, open source
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