diaspora /dī-ˈas-p(ə-)rə, dē-/
origin: Greek, διασπορά – “a scattering [of seeds]”
1. the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network
WATCH: Team Diaspora discusses the site.
Diaspora: Personally Controlled, Do-It-All, Distributed Open-Source Social Network from daniel grippi on Vimeo.
Source: http://nyti.ms/dpirYG
Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook
Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 20, far left; Dan Grippi, 21; Max Salzberg, 22; and Raphael Sofaer, 19, all students at N.Y.U., are trying to reinvent social networking online.
By JIM DWYER
Published: May 11, 2010
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.
They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000, using an online site, Kickstarter, that helps creative people find support.
It turned out that just about all they had to do was whisper their plans.
“We were shocked,” said one of the four, Dan Grippi, 21. “For some strange reason, everyone just agreed with this whole privacy thing.”
They announced their project on April 24. They reached their $10,000 goal in 12 days, and the money continues to come in: as of Tuesday afternoon, they had raised $23,676 from 739 backers. “Maybe 2 or 3 percent of the money is from people we know,” said Max Salzberg, 22.
Working with Mr. Salzberg and Mr. Grippi are Raphael Sofaer, 19, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 20 — “four talented young nerds,” Mr. Salzberg says — all of whom met at New York University’s Courant Institute. They have called their project Diaspora* and intend to distribute the software free, and to make the code openly available so that other programmers can build on it. As they describe it, the Diaspora* software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share. Mr. Sofaer says that centralized networks like Facebook are not necessary. “In our real lives, we talk to each other,” he said. “We don’t need to hand our messages to a hub. What Facebook gives you as a user isn’t all that hard to do. All the little games, the little walls, the little chat, aren’t really rare things. The technology already exists.”
The terms of the bargain people make with social networks — you swap personal information for convenient access to their sites — have been shifting, with the companies that operate the networks collecting ever more information about their users. That information can be sold to marketers. Some younger people are becoming more cautiousabout what they post. “When you give up that data, you’re giving it up forever,” Mr. Salzberg said. “The value they give us is negligible in the scale of what they are doing, and what we are giving up is all of our privacy.”
The Diaspora* group was inspired to begin their project after hearing a talk by Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University, who described the centralized social networks as “spying for free,” Mr. Salzberg said.
The four students met in a computer room at N.Y.U., and have spent nearly every waking minute there for months. They understand the appeal of social networks.
“Certainly, as nerds, we have nowhere else to go,” Mr. Salzberg said. “We’re big nerds.”
“My social life has definitely collapsed in favor of maintaining a decent GPA and doing this,” Mr. Sofaer said.
A teacher and digital media researcher at N.Y.U., Finn Brunton, said that their project — which does not involve giant rounds of venture capital financing before anyone writes a line of code — reflected “a return of the classic geek means of production: pizza and ramen and guys sleeping under the desks because it is something that it is really exciting and challenging.”
And the demand for a social network that gives users control is strong, Mr. Brunton said. “Everyone I talk to about this says, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been waiting for someone to do something like that.’ ”
There have been at least two other attempts at decentralized networks, Mr. Brunton said, but he thought the Diaspora* group had a firmer plan. Its quick success in raising money, he said, showed the discontent over the state of privacy on the social sites. “We will have to see how widely this will be adopted by the non-nerds,” Mr. Brunton said. “But I don’t know a single person in the geek demographic who is not freaked out” by large social networks and cyber warehouses of information.
The Diaspora* crew has no doubts about the sprawling strengths and attractions of existing social networks, having gotten more than 2,000 followers of “joindiaspora” on Twitter in just a few weeks.
“So many people think it needs to exist,” Mr. Salzberg said. “We’re making it because we want to use it.”
Despite Facebook's ubiquity, there have long been other social networks that have vied to replace, or at least operate in the same milieu. And the grumblings in the media and among users have made this a good time for these alternatives to come forward.
One project in particular seems to have received a substantial amount of attention: the Diaspora Project. The brainchild of four NYU students, Diaspora aims to be a distributed, open-source social network.
Arguably, under normal circumstance, an idea like that, proposed by four unknown college student would not necessarily get much attention. But there are two interesting forces that helped propel them and their project into the spotlight.
A Good Idea and a Good Story: Interested in developing an alternative to the social media site, Dan Grippi (age 21), Max Salzberg (age 22), Raphael Sofaer (age 19), and Ilya Zhitomirskiy (age 20) wanted to build a social network that didn't acquiesce to the same data control as Facebook. They wanted their project to be open source, meaning they would share the code so that other developers could implement and improve it. They also wanted the social network to be distributed, that is, it would be run via the computers of subscribers rather than by servers housed in one location and owned by a single company. Data would be portable. In other words, you could control your data and move it easily in and out of the system. And your data could be kept private.
In order to support their design and coding work, they decided decided to post their project idea to Kickstarter, an online site that allows creatives to receive small donations to support their endeavors. The four students gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000. They met that goal within twelve days. And then, a few days later the New York Times ran the story titled "Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook," attention skyrocketed. To date, they have raised over $150,000.
Grassroots Funding: It's a good story, and a timely one. But while sometimes this sort of media attention may provide a startup a funding offer from a major investment source, in the case of Diaspora, they opted for a grassroots funding effort. The Kickstarter site allows projects to accept a range of donation sizes, from small to large - from one dollar to thousands. In the case of Diaspora, over 2000 people donated $25. Around 1000 donated $5. While there were several large donors, the project did not rely on a small number of large investments to fund the project, but instead gathered small donations from a large number of people.
Diaspora is working on their alternative network now, although it's unknown what if any impact this will have on Facebook in the long run. Nonetheless, this sudden grassroots interest in and funding of an alternative, open source site marks an interesting juncture in social media.
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