Straight out of NYU, four engineering students have decided to take on Facebook with an open source personal web service that put’s individuals in control of their data, called Diaspora. Chronicled in both The New York Times and Mashable, these four ambitious young entrepreneurs have set their sites on what is becoming the new Microsoft on the Internet – Facebook.
The Diaspora team — Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Ilya Zhitomirskiy and Raphael Sofaer — strongly believe that sharing information via social network and maintaining a reasonable level of privacy should not have to be mutually exclusive. Their project Diaspora is to build a social network that allows everyone to install their own “seeds”, which is a personal space with the user’s photos, videos and anything else they like, within the larger social network. Their “seed” would be fully controlled by the user and they can choose who they share their data with, if at all.
In addition to their grand vision, one other unique story-line from these four is how they got their seed funding to get their idea off the ground. They started with just an idea and a dream — to raise $10,000 by June 1, 2010 so that they could spend the summer making their vision a reality. They turned to a very cool new fundraising platform called Kickstarter to see if they could sell their idea to potential investors. They reached their goal in just 12 days. Now, still more than two weeks away from their deadline, the team of programmers has already broke $100,000 via Kickstarter.
Here is a brief clip from the Diaspora team talking about their vision:
Diaspora: Personally Controlled, Do-It-All, Distributed Open-Source Social Network from daniel grippi on Vimeo.
Stay tuned throughout the summer at the Diaspora blog. Also, check out Kickstarter – very cool new projects from a lot of extremely bright minds.
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