Amidst plenty of discussion and unhappiness around Facebook‘s attitude towards user privacy and control, a group of four college students in New York are raising money to build an alternative social network called Diaspora, which they say will be “œan open-source personal web service that will put individuals in control of their data“.
Their original goal was to raise $10,000 by 1 June, using the fundraising platform Kickstarter. They reached that goal in just 12 days.
And now, with more than two weeks to go till the deadline, current pledges on their Kickstarter page total $128 496.
Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy are going to be spending their summer break coding away furiously, as the next goal is to complete the core application in time for a September 2010 release.
In short, Diaspora will allow individuals to set up their own node within the network, and to maintain complete control and ownership of anything they choose to share on that node. Here‘s a video of Daniel, Maxwell, Raphael and Ilya explaining the concept:
