Diaspora Releases First Code

Diaspora, the “privacy-aware, personally-controlled” alternative to Facebook has today (16 September 2010) released its first code as the four New York students behind it continue their quest to make a more controlled social environment for users.

The first thing that comes to mind about it is that it looks surprisingly familiar!

“Now a Community Project”

The idea for Diaspora grew from the storm of controversy surrounding Facebook’s privacy settings. The social media giant was criticised for having complex settings that people found hard to understand let alone implement. They since simplified these settings but the seed for Diaspora had already been sewn.

The aim of Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy is to create a user controlled social alternative to Facebook.

A statement on the official Diaspora said: “This is now a community project and development is open to anyone with the technical expertise who shares the vision of a social network that puts users in control.

“We live our real lives in context, speaking from whatever aspect of ourselves that those around us know. Social tools should work the same way. Getting the source into the hands of developers is our first experiment in making a simple and functional tool for contextual sharing. Diaspora is in its infancy, but our initial ideas are there.”

The first public product is penciled in for launch in October.