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Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Introducing Diaspora*: A student-led effort to create a privacy-smart successor to Facebook

Proving that young people are not comfortable with the idea of surrendering their privacy to big companies like Facebook, a group of bright New York University students has launched an effort to create an open-source, decentralized, privacy-smart social networking apparatus. The New York Times reports:
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.
According to the Diaspora* project page on Kickstarter, they're actually up to nearly $70,000 in contributions from nearly 2,000 backers as of tonight. That's incredibly impressive. They managed to triple their total amount of pledged dollars in less than forty-eight hours. No doubt the New York Times story — beautifully written by reporter Jim Dwyer — helped raise their profile.

So what, exactly, is Diaspora*, and how will it be different from Facebook?
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.”
Indeed it does.

Seriously, kudos to Raphael, Dan, Max, and Ilya. Four students spending their summer engineering a Facebook-like social networking service and releasing their project as free software under the GPL? That's just marvelous. What a cool idea!

As any technophile knows, the Internet itself is a decentralized network of computers. The Internet's defining structure happens to also be its greatest strength. It is the most democratic medium for communication ever invented precisely because it's not controlled by any one entity or set of entities.

The technological evolution of the Internet is filled with advances that started out centralized but ultimately became decentralized.

For example, en masse file sharing arguably began with Napster, a centralized network that allowed users to easily swap downloaded songs. Recording studios successfully sued to have Napster shut down, but file sharing did not die with Napster's demise in 2001. Instead, it simply became decentralized — through Gnutella, Freenet, BitTorrent, and other protocols.

In the instant messaging arena, there's XMPP, the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. Begun in 1998 as Jabber, XMPP is an open-source alternative to proprietary IM networks like AOL and MSN. XMPP doesn't have a central authoritative server; rather, anybody who wants to set up their own can. It is now used by tens of millions of people. We at NPI are enthusiastic XMPP users.

Is decentralization also the future of social networking and cloud computing? We believe the answer is yes. That doesn't necessarily mean that Facebook — or Google Apps/Docs and Amazon EC2 for that matter — will be abandoned by all their users. But it's likely that those services won't be as popular as they are today.

It's worth remembering that Facebook was initially popularized by college students (in fact, it was only open to college students). Ironically, they just might be the first demographic to abandon Facebook in search of a better virtual hangout. Services running Diaspora* could very well provide that hangout someday soon, and be seamlessly interconnected to any number of other "federated" hangouts.

As people discover that they can belong to a social network without having to sign away their privacy to Facebook, it's possible we could see a slow migration away from Facebook. It's not unprecedented: Remember when MySpace had more traffic and more users than Facebook? Today, MySpace is in decline, a shadow of its former self. If Facebook continues to arrogantly intrude upon its users' privacy (as it is doing today) it could suddenly find itself in a similar position.

We will be tracking the progress with Diaspora* with great interest. Maybe, a few years from now, we'll be able to look back and recognize the spring of 2010 as the beginning of an important, democratic revolution in social networking.

Comments:

Blogger Josh said...

Why not just build this on top of Freenet? Freenet version 0.8 will come with a Forum system (FreeTalk).

freenetproject.org

May 16, 2010 9:01 PM  

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