Anti Facebook Diaspora Project Is on The Road

The big challenge is that the enterprise developer world isn't screaming out for an open-source Facebook, nor are consumers really looking to run their own instances of social networks. What they really want is for Facebook to take privacy more seriously--something the company has started to do--and to respect users' choices in how and where their data gets shared.

A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

Facebook appeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us, too. If I put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things, I can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get sex or approval.

According to the project's homepage, the students, Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, "bonded over many late nights building a Makerbot," (to you non-geeks, that's a type of robot) and they "started discussing what a distributed social network would look like."