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

From Diaspora's blog their goal is to: 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.

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.