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  • Diaspora: The open social network

    Prasad Ajinkya

    Prasad Ajinkya

    @prasad-aSUfhP
    Updated: Oct 19, 2024
    Views: 969
    The last month has seen the entire world go up in arms with Facebook’s privacy glitch. This was not the first time that Facebook had drawn flak; the current glitch is that strangers can go through your private content if they share a connection with you who is foolhardy enough to keep open privacy settings. Here is one such application that tells you how #-Link-Snipped-# your Facebook profile is.

    Riding on this wave, is a bunch of geeks living on pizza in a computer lab who have declared their project about creating an open source social network. They started this project a few months back, and would need three to four months to complete. Their timing could not be any better, within a month they have raised just about $200,000 for their #-Link-Snipped-#.

    What these people intend to do, is release the source of their application so that people can host their individual social networking “<em>nodes</em>”. The data flow of the node would be encrypted and complete control will be given to the user to decide what goes in and what is published. The name<em> Diaspora</em>, which means the spreading of seeds could not be more apt. With over five thousand people backing their effort, it’s a case study of how the community supports people who make software for the community.

    #-Link-Snipped-#
    Open Social Network

    Although, the idea seems novel, and the team is highly motivated of achieving the results, they are facing quite a few complicated issues.
    <ul>
    [*] If the social network were a distributed system, then you would require an indexing server. The more the social network takes off, the higher the demands on the indexing server.
    [*] Content indexing (at least that content which is shared willingly) would be data intensive
    [*] Revenue streams other than advertisements would be a welcome change. If the individual node hosts get a share of the revenue, then you have hit gold.
    </ul>
    Only time will tell, how Diaspora spreads with the seeds of freedom. Meanwhile, check out the teams promises in this embedded video below.

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    <a href="https://vimeo.com/11099292" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Diaspora: Personally Controlled, Do-It-All, Distributed Open-Source Social Network on Vimeo</a> from #-Link-Snipped-# on <a href="https://vimeo.com" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Vimeo | The world's only all-in-one video solution</a>.
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