Diaspora - One Month In

I have previously written about Diaspora, the privacy aware social networking platform. The team over at Diaspora managed to raise over $200k through kickstarter to create a privacy aware, personally controlled, open source social network that will rival Facebook. This is certainly a bold statement and the large public investment through donations also adds a lot of pressure...

Well it's now been over one month since their development began and the team have released the first preview of Diaspora on their blog. So what have they achieved in one month?

"We have been focusing on developing a system for passing different forms of information in between seeds. When you post a status message on your seed, it gets pushed over HTTP in real time to all of your friends.

We have also started to build the latest and greatest in web standards into Diaspora. Websockets are already in the Diaspora core, and any Diaspora plugins will be able to have rapid two-way functionality, (think chat, games etc) almost effortlessly!"

Not bad for 30 days. They also shared some screenshots and a short video demonstration.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the user interface has a similar feel to Facebook and the video demonstration below shows status messages being pushed in real time over HTTP. Looks nice and snappy so far, let's hope it scales well (considering Facebook's 400 million active users).

Finally, the team have shared a draft timeline and, if all goes to plan, it looks like we might see an early version of Diaspora available in September 2010. This seems like an ambitious goal, however the team have shown good progress so far and seem to have the dedication to see the project through. As a result I say let's stoping doubting their abilities and let them do their work. I for one will be looking forward to the next update.

To follow the Diaspora team for yourself head over to their blog.

Diaspora - Privacy Aware Social Networking

Facebook is the second biggest website in the world (behind Google) and has over 400 million active users worldwide. Unfortunately, even with it's amazing success, Facebook has received constant criticism regarding privacy.

The main issue with Facebook is that by default your data stored on Facebook is public, unless you go through the painful and sometimes confusing process of making it private. The main issue is that many of the 400 million users don't realise that their data (information, updates, pictures, videos, etc) are openly available for anyone to view. If you don't believe me check out Openbook, this website uses the official Facebook API to search through the Facebook updates based on keywords. By searching for "Cheated on girl" or "Hate my job" you are able to openly browse millions of status updates that people believed were private to just their close friends or family. 

Thankfully a new start-up called Diaspora aims to create a privacy aware, personally controlled, open source social network. In my opinion this project has huge potential and has already gained considerable backing (both community and financial). My only hope is that they can take the Facebook story and learn from it. The video below was put together by the Diaspora development team and explains who they are and what their vision of social networking looks like.

The development team have successfully raised the required funds through kickstarter and are now busily coding (in Ruby, with a bit of Rails). Make sure you follow their progress - blog and Twitter.