Open source social network Diaspora has launched, offering and more privacy-focussed’ alternative to Facebook.
The social network was founded earlier this year while Facebook was under fire for its privacy settings- in particular, the company’s terms and conditions that give it complete rights over all your personal data and the inability to remove your user account completely from the site.
Diaspora, by contrast, is based around the premise of giving its users full control over their personal data at all times.
The community-funded project is currently only open to a small number of invited people, but the company hopes to begin adding more people in the coming weeks.
“By taking these baby steps, we’ll be able to quickly identify performance problems and iterate on features as quickly as possible,” the four US students behind the service wrote in a blog post.
The team say they will continue to refine the site in response to feedback.
“Our number one goal has been releasing something that works. Sometimes that means making a bit of a mess. Now that we have working features, we can double down on making the code more concise and straightforward, and improving our test suite.”
One of the ways it aims to do this is by decentralising the service, allowing people to run their own Diaspora server. Sites such as Facebook keeps its data in centralised banks of servers.
In addition, it aims to sell its service based on its privacy settings.
“Diaspora doesn’t make you wade through pages of settings and options just to keep your profile secure,” it says, in an apparent dig at Facebook.
In recent years a number of new social networking sites have cropped up including Appleseed, OneSocialWeb and Elgg with the aim to challenge Facebook’s dominance.
Read the full Diaspora blog post here:
http://blog.joindiaspora.com/2010/11/23/private-alpha-released.html
