500 million users and $33bn worth, two numbers that best describe Facebook. Facebook has been lately the fastest growing social networking website and seems that nothing can stop it from its ascenssion. Recently, developers of Diaspora, an open alternative to Facebook, announced its launch on 15 September 2010 and what it seems as an impossible task – challenging Facebook – is something the online environment should have an eye on.
The developers team made of 4 US students had a difficult time raising the funds for building this project from scratch but in the end 6,500 people contributed with money and the numbers reached $200,000. Three computer scientists and one mathematician are part of this team. Needing the money to fund this project, the four colleagues headed to fundraising website Kickstarter where their goal was to raise $10,000, but in the end more people contributed with larger amounts of money ( Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg reported that he also donated to this project) so that they ended up with 20 times more that they were thinking. Earlier this year, this open-source project was a very hot subject while Facebook simplified its privacy setting after receiving lot of criticism for being too complex and confusing.
The team wrote on their blog that after spending the summer building this open-source network it is now fully functionable and will be released on September 15th. This user interface will alow users to decide by themselves where their shared content to be distributed, like from co-workers to all-day chaps or business partners.
The 15 September release will mean that the developers team are making the programming code available for anyone to see an modify, but we should be waiting for Diaspora to be available to members which are in search for more privacy through social networks nowadays.