Diaspora: The open social network

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 “nodes”. 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 Diaspora, 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.

[*] 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.

Only time will tell, how Diaspora spreads with the seeds of freedom. Meanwhile, check out the teams promises in this embedded video below.



Diaspora: Personally Controlled, Do-It-All, Distributed Open-Source Social Network on Vimeo from #-Link-Snipped-# on Vimeo | The world's only all-in-one video solution.