Centralized or distributed friendsfeeds? Notice Diaspora

The Diaspora team maxwell daniel raphael ilya

(Courtesy for photo: joindiaspora.com)

SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOITATION. Currently, much of the attention and discussions in mass media and among companies are focused on how to enter, use and exploit rapidly growing social media such as Facebook (about half of the population of Norway is apparently already having an account on FB).
However, many issues of reuse, commercialization and privacy seem yet unsolved. Would Facebook administrators for example share our FB information and emergent behaviours with corporate others such as publishing houses or magazine sellers?

While some corporations and publishing houses are debating the new media possibilities of reaching potential customers in new ways through Facebook, some users and developers are already looking for alternative and what they see as less centralized ways of sharing news and other content with friends.

THE BIG QUESTION is how to actually combine sharing content with (many or selective) others with some privacy intact or at least a degree of self-governance of your "own" information, pics, news feeds, variety of connections and other activities including both social and purchasing behaviour.

DIASPORA. Notice the alternative project Diaspora by a dedicated "boy-band" it seems, of young developers and students (from NYU). At least when you see four of them on You Tube, seems to be a devoted group of young men, check out the link below where they introduce their dedication to working on this current project. (Need to check out more on their backgrounds and interests later!)

See some introduction first here:

Is Your Startup Too Geeky? Written by Audrey Watters / May 15, 2010 http://bit.ly/cc42Vr

TEAM EXPLAINING. The current Diaspora Team is: Maxwell, Daniel, Raphael and Ilya. Hear the guys self-explaining their project here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqxQgfQD24M&feature=player_embedded

NAME BACKGROUND. Diaspora, what does it mean? A diaspora (in Greek, διασπορά – "a scattering [of seeds]")

- and according to Wikipedia it is "any movement of a population sharing common national and/or ethnic identity. While refugees may or may not ultimately settle in a new geographic location, the term diaspora refers to a permanently displaced and relocated collective."

(It is a name with a long history of meanings connected to for example exciles of people which is beyond this post).

- according to the current Diaspora project (link) is specifically "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network."

I guess we might also associate this with the possible future alternatives, complementaries, and/or excile from FB?

Ron Callary over at Inventorspot says:

- The central premise is to replicate the Facebook user experience that’s proven popular (until recent date), but to allow the Diaspora social network to be available on users’ own personal Web servers -- called “seeds.” This differs from Facebook's centralized user interface that claims ownership of users’ content and marketable data while running roughshod over their privacy data. At the rate at which Diaspora is growing and gaining funding, if it continues at its current pace, it might be the Facebook alternative many ex-FBers are looking for.

If anyone has more info on the further work of this free and possibly antifacebook project, please share with us.

UPDATES AND COMMENTS:

Jonathan Higgins comments on Diaspora on 16 May 2010 on the ReadWriteWeb:

- Will that scale ? Time will tell.

Does Diaspora need to scale to hundreds of millions of "users" to be relevant ?

Now that's a question that's worth thinking about.

(SEE my comment in separate new post 16 May).