A couple of months ago Facebook was up to its ears in trouble over the way it was treating users’ information and privacy. It led to a crisis meeting at the company’s California HQ.
Politicians in Washington even got wind of the stramash (good Scottish word for uproar) and told the company get its act together.
Europe weighed in. So did privacy officials in Canada. Advocacy groups had a field day as Facebook seemed to get it so wrong as it made its play to rule the web as it becomes more social.
There was even a kind of Facebook revolt with plenty of people talking about quitting the world’s biggest social network. That clearly didn’t come to pass given that since the April/May debacle, Facebook has announced it has over 500 million users.
Of course, it wasn’t Facebook’s first tangle with privacy problems. And it probably won’t be its last.
But back in April/May it seemed there was a kind of perfect storm around the issue and four enterprising students saw their moment and grabbed the spotlight.
Maxwell Salzberg, Daniel Grippi, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirski got together to create an alternative to Facebook that would be a “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network”.
At the time they told the BBC “this is not just about Facebook. Facebook is not what we are going after.
“We are going after the idea there are all these centralised services where people are giving up their personal information. We want to put users back in control of what they share. “
But the Facebook backlash helped the enterprising students raise over $200,000 on Kickstarter, the highest amount ever raised on the site. And get this – they were originally only after $10,000. Such was the furore over Facebook’s missteps that the money just poured in.
Over the last few months, the boys have been coding like mad. In an update on their blog, the team announced when they will roll out their product.
“We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th.
“We are spending a good chunk of time concentrating on building clear, contextual sharing. That means an intuitive way for users to decide, and not notice deciding, what content goes to their coworkers and what goes to their drinking buddies.”
So what kind of web world will greet Diaspora when it is launched next month?
The fevered atmosphere towards Facebook has eased somewhat after the company made some adjustments to its privacy policy.
While privacy remains a serious issue that users care about, people have not fled the site as many threatened back then. It is just too useful to their lives.
All this will affect Diaspora to some degree but I don’t think these changes will sideline interest. I do think Diaspora will be more than just a passing curiosity. The four students just have to deliver on their promises and come up with some ideas that will challenge the space.
Sure, as the New York Times notes, Diaspora became something of a media darling at the time, but I think there will be a lot of people watching to see just what the team come up with. Not least from Facebook founder and ceo Mark Zuckerberg who did express support for what the boys where doing at the time. Perhaps he might even offer them a job.
It’s a big test for the foursome but Maxwell, Daniel, Raphael and Ilya will clearly worry about all of that later as they prepare to kick up their heels for a hedonistic getaway at the world famous Burning Man Festival in California.
