Diaspora

Diaspora is a project that was founded by New York University students Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy. Diaspora is intended to be an open-source, decentralized alternative to Facebook.

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History

In 2010 the group of founders began a fundraising campaign on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter. Within 12 days they surpassed their funding goal of $10,000 and when the funding closed after 39 days on Kickstater the project had secured $200,000 in funding. In September of 2010, the group released a developer preview of the site that had many security holes. In November of 2011, Diaspora released a redesigned alpha version, several days after it was discovered that one of the founders, Ilya Zhitomirskiy had committed suicide. Diaspora has plans in place to launch a beta test of their service in 2012

Mission and Concept

From Diaspora's blog their goal is to:

Mission

Diaspora*’s mission as a company is to build tools to help people get control of their data and do fun things with it online. It’s about giving users ownership and control over what they share, and creating amazing things. It’s about promoting Diaspora* open source software to everyone, because we think this is the right thing to do. A new social web model where users are not the product, but willful participants who are creating new modes of communication.

Additionally Diaspora has adopted the Social Network User's Bill of Rights which was drafted at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference in 2010. When a service adopts the Social Network User's Bill of Rights a user expects the social networking service to provide the following in their Terms of Service, Privacy Policies, and administration of their service:

 ;Bill of Rights

• Honesty: Honor your privacy policy and terms of service.
• Clarity: Make sure that policies, terms of service, and settings are easy to find and understand.
• Freedom of speech: Do not delete or modify my data without a clear policy and justification.
• Empowerment : Support assistive technologies and universal accessibility
• Self-protection: Support privacy-enhancing technologies.
• Data minimization: Minimize the information I am required to provide and share with others.
• Control: Let me control my data, and don’t facilitate sharing it unless I agree first.
• Predictability: Obtain my prior consent before significantly changing who can see my data.
• Data portability: Make it easy for me to obtain a copy of my data.
• Protection: Treat my data as securely as your own confidential data unless I choose to share it, and notify me if it is compromised.
• Right to know: Show me how you are using my data and allow me to see who and what has access to it.
• Right to self-define: Let me create more than one identity and use pseudonyms. Do not link them without my permission.
• Right to appeal: Allow me to appeal punitive actions.
• Right to withdraw: Allow me to delete my account, and remove my data.

Features and Applications

The service includes the following features among others hashtag following, direct messages, status updates, Like buttons, a notifications, channel. Cubbi.es is Diaspora's first application which allows users to post photos that they discover on the web to Diaspora via browser extensions.