Diaspora to Launch September 15

Diaspora, an open-source social network billing itself as an alternative to Facebook, has now set a launch date of September 15^th. "Diaspora," the word, literally means "a scattering of seeds," but is most often associated with the Jewish exile from Israel (when a proper noun), and similar movements of peoples with a common ethnicity. Obviously, in this iteration, Diaspora refers to what the creators are hoping is a mass exodus from Facebook to the new, open-source social network.

The four-man team behind the project used Kickstarter, the "crowd-sourced" funding website, to raise a whopping $200,000 -- not only the most money ever raised on Kickstarter, but $190k more than the team's goal!

But, at the time Diaspora was announced (May, 2010), Facebook had just announced their new, and highly controversial, privacy policy; a lot has changed since then, including Facebook's privacy policy. Facebook continues to grow (we just posted about seniors flocking to the site and change, and now has some 500 million users. Diaspora's blog post states they have done away with API and the like for now, so even though the coding itself will be open source, it is unclear as to what users can do with it.

In fact, somewhat ironically, the Diaspora team has a Facebook profile.

© C Harris Lynn, 2010