Big Brother is not welcome
Diaspora social network was started by four New York University students, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Dan Grippi, Max Salzberg and Raphael Sofaer...They actually came up with the crazy idea not to sell or share YOUR personal information which you have entrusted in their network (to advertising companies for monetary gain)...Their inspiration came when they sat in on an address by Dr. Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor, to the Internet Society's New York Chapter...Dr. Moglen attributed centralized social networks of "spying for free"...
Crowd sourcing was used to generate startup capital for Diaspora, the not for profit, user owned distributed social networking site...On April 24, 2010, Kickstarter, a microfunding website launched their project for them, estimating that it might take 39 days to raise the assessed $10,000 that they required to get their project officially off the ground...Well, within 12 days they had raised their measley $10k and raised a total of $200,000 from more than 6500 investors including Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook...It was the second most successfully launched project on the Kickstarter website...
On November 23, 2010 the alpha version of Diaspora was released privately by invitation only... The Diaspora Foundation website launched at the end of September 2011...Next a fundraising campaign which started in October 2011 was temporarily suspended when PayPal froze the foundation's account (which had raised over $45k dollars in a few days) and then eventually releasing it without an explanation or apology... So of course the foundation diversified its funding streams by adding Stripe and Bitcoin as donation avenues...
In an equally strange turn of events one of the co-founders, Ilya Zhitomirskiy died, at the age of 22, on November 12, 2011 from an apparent suicide...Some speculate that
the pressures of being part of high-profile startup could have played a factor in his apparent suicide...It's entirely possible, since some apparent haters of this decentralized social networking project posted negative comments on posts related to Zhitomirskiy's death...
Despite some negative reviews, a major well received feature of Diaspora is that its users own their own data, forever and a day, and therefore they have complete control on how it is shared and each user can download all text and images anytime they choose...As of September 2011, Diaspora was still in the alpha stage, needing to work out the kinks with the video uploading and embedding capabilities...Diaspora's future is unknown since the hype has faded with the negative reviews by hackers of large security problems in their code...
Diaspora has 180,000 users in contrast to Google+ with 40 million and Facebook with 800 million... Diaspora's slogan is "Share what you want, with whom you want"...In other words, Big Brother will only be watching you by invitation only...
Ilya discusses the inspiration for the Diapora project in the video below...
Diaspora social network was started by four New York University students, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Dan Grippi, Max Salzberg and Raphael Sofaer...They actually came up with the crazy idea not to sell or share YOUR personal information which you have entrusted in their network (to advertising companies for monetary gain)...Their inspiration came when they sat in on an address by Dr. Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor, to the Internet Society's New York Chapter...Dr. Moglen attributed centralized social networks of "spying for free"...
Crowd sourcing was used to generate startup capital for Diaspora, the not for profit, user owned distributed social networking site...On April 24, 2010, Kickstarter, a microfunding website launched their project for them, estimating that it might take 39 days to raise the assessed $10,000 that they required to get their project officially off the ground...Well, within 12 days they had raised their measley $10k and raised a total of $200,000 from more than 6500 investors including Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook...It was the second most successfully launched project on the Kickstarter website...
On November 23, 2010 the alpha version of Diaspora was released privately by invitation only... The Diaspora Foundation website launched at the end of September 2011...Next a fundraising campaign which started in October 2011 was temporarily suspended when PayPal froze the foundation's account (which had raised over $45k dollars in a few days) and then eventually releasing it without an explanation or apology... So of course the foundation diversified its funding streams by adding Stripe and Bitcoin as donation avenues...
In an equally strange turn of events one of the co-founders, Ilya Zhitomirskiy died, at the age of 22, on November 12, 2011 from an apparent suicide...Some speculate that
the pressures of being part of high-profile startup could have played a factor in his apparent suicide...It's entirely possible, since some apparent haters of this decentralized social networking project posted negative comments on posts related to Zhitomirskiy's death...
Despite some negative reviews, a major well received feature of Diaspora is that its users own their own data, forever and a day, and therefore they have complete control on how it is shared and each user can download all text and images anytime they choose...As of September 2011, Diaspora was still in the alpha stage, needing to work out the kinks with the video uploading and embedding capabilities...Diaspora's future is unknown since the hype has faded with the negative reviews by hackers of large security problems in their code...
Diaspora has 180,000 users in contrast to Google+ with 40 million and Facebook with 800 million... Diaspora's slogan is "Share what you want, with whom you want"...In other words, Big Brother will only be watching you by invitation only...
Ilya discusses the inspiration for the Diapora project in the video below...
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