Diaspora Hits Home: Do We Really Need a New Social Network?
Posted by Martin_Connelly on Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Diaspora*, a startup that hasn’t even started, is big news (albeit within the great echo chamber) today, with coverage everywhere from the BBC to the Chronicle of Higher Ed.
The story goes like this: A group of four NYU students hear a lecture on Internet freedom by Columbia professor Eben Moglen. They sit in the computer lab, eating ramen and drinking diet coke, and come up with this brilliant idea to make “The Anti Facebook,” a place where users control their own content, and their own statistics information. This group of four nerds (a self assigned title) decides to look for funding, not from some slimy west coast venture capital firm, but from the people themselves via Kickstarter. Money starts pouring in, more than three ten times what they asked for.
It’s a story full of classic tropes, coders sticking it to the man, working all night, eating poorly. According to the New York Times
One of their teachers, Finn Brunton, said that their project — which does not involve giant rounds of venture capital financing before anyone writes a line of code — reflected “a return of the classic geek means of production: pizza and ramen and guys sleeping under the desks because it is something that it is really exciting and challenging.”
Personally, I’m excited to see what these guys (they’re all men 19-22) cook up, and I’ll probably join when it’s ready. But under other circumstances I don’t think this would really be a story at all.
What the Diaspora* team is looking to build is basically a network of personal websites (like, say, Tumblr blogs) that allow users publish updates to a network (like every other social network ) and talk to each other through instant messaging, VoIP, and email (admittedly, VoIP would be a nice feature). People will be given the option to host their own “seed” or pay for turnkey hosting (at least, that’s what the “3 months free hosting” in return for a Kickstarter donation would suggest) ala WordPress. There’s nothing new here, but I don’t think that’s the point.
This isn’t really about Diaspora*, it’s about Facebook. It used to be, Facebook was just a way to goof off when you didn’t want to do your homework, but now, it’s a whole new beast. All of the privacy changes, and the new Open Graph Semantic Web Blah Blah Blah have generated a huge amount of press, most of it negative.
I would argue people are thinking about what they do online more than they ever have before, and all that thinking isn’t good for Facebook’s image.
The success of the Diaspora* story might suggest that change is in the air, and perhaps it is. But more than 400 million users make for an awful lot of inertia. Think of all the pictures you would loose if you decided to deactivate your Facebook account, having to reorganize all your “friends”. It’s going to be a huge pain in the ass, and one it sounds like you’re going to have to pay for. Is control of your data really worth it?
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About the author
Martin Connelly is a freelance transmedia journalist based in St. John's, Newfoundland. He's worked across borders, both figurative and literal: as a newsroom editor for China Central Television In...
