Before you say: Oh no! Not another one! – I must warn you that this one is really and essentially different. Yes, I want to draw your attention to Diaspora, a social network that is very promising (it's not released yet). So, what's so new, significant and different from all the other social networks?
Diaspora is:
- open source – This mean that all the code that runs Diaspora is open and available to the public. Why that matters to you? First, it's more secure and we can actually know what it does. Even if you are not a programmer, even if you can't put a single line of code, it does matter to you. Because there are people out there, independent geeks that will comb every piece of that code looking for bugs and malicious bits. Which is quite unlike the proprietary code that stays closed in the company and nobody outside knows what it does. If something is handling all that data about us, then transparency is
a nicean essential thing to have. Second, due to all those independent programmers, bugs get squashed much faster and software develops much faster and more according to our needs. - decentralized – Unlike any other social network out there, Diaspora is going to be without central server that will store and process all our data. You'll be free to choose which provider will host your account or you'll be able to do it yourself, yet all the accounts over all the servers will be able to communicate. Just like blogs, you can open an account on WordPress.com or Blogger or Live Journal or you can get the code and host it yourself (this should be easy thing to do) thus gaining many possibilities and full control over your server. This is huge! Web is meant to be decentralized. That is the only way we can have the freedom and control of the communication.
- encrypted – All the communication between peers is encrypted. For the geeks among you, it's done by GPG. I have no idea what's that beside encryption system so if any of you can give the rest of us something understandable about it, please share it in the comments. Encryption matters because all the data we share among us will not be available to intermediate computers like our IS providers and people who might try to steal it.
- giving you full control – Control over the code plus control over the hosting plus encryption gains us full control over the data stored. I am not sure if you are aware that even after you delete your FaceBook account pictures and videos you submitted will stay on their servers. That's what you've agreed to when you agreed to their privacy policy. Once you upload something, you gave up your rights. Which is crazy. Your pictures are yours and no site can take them just because they have hosted them for a while.
- communicating with other sites – OK, this one is not specific as other social networks are also trying to pull your Flickr, Twitter and everything else to them, but it's worth mentioning. Especially because Diaspora plans to communicate with other sites both ways and that plugins for new or exotic sites will come easily due to open sourced code. Beside that, this will make transition from FaceBook and others easy and painless.
Who is behind all this?
Their names are Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy. They are NYU computer science students on their final year, having skills and willing to do something about current state of social networks. So they will spend this summer coding Diaspora and then, in September, will make the first servers available to public and release the code.
They're financing this project via Kickstarter, and while their initial aim of $10.000 is more than met, there is some more space to help them and maybe grab yourself a nice deal.
Oh yes, one more thing. They have a dandelion on their banner! How can I not love it?
GPG is one of the open source versions of PGP, which is, in short, the first really excellent encryption available for regular people. It’s a good thing.
Thank you :)