Personally I think Diaspora is vital to the future of social networking on the web, so I donated to the project on Kickstarter. The guys behind it are very passionate about the project and I think the goals are amazing: let you share what you want bur your data remains yours. I can’t wait to see where this goes.
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.
And so the backlash begins–I’ve been predicting for a long time that the era of “privacy is dead” wouldn’t last, and the shot heard ’round the world in this case was Facebook’s recent actions around privacy.
I applaud these guys for taking this on. Someone needed to and I think there will be a pretty huge uptake of this before long. Make sure and read the transcript of Eben Moglen’s “Freedom in the Cloud” talk if you haven’t already. Great food for thought.
Free software has won: practically all of the biggest and most exciting Web companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter run on it. But it is also in danger of losing, because those same services now represent a huge threat to our freedom as a result of the vast stores of information they hold about us, and the in-depth surveillance that implies.
Excellent interview with Eben Moglen about the state of freedom in the age of social networking. Make sure to read the second page too–there are some surprisingly revolutionary (and simple!) ideas about how to turn the current situation on its head so we can get the benefit of social networking without giving up so much control and freedom.