Anti-Facebook Diaspora alpha release in October

The anti-Facebook project, Diaspora, a "privacy-aware, personally controlled" social network will launch its public alpha version in October this year. Open-source developer release coming in September 15.

What is Diaspora, you ask? It's an ambitious summer coding project by four students - Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, Ilya Zhitomirskiy are the brains behind Diaspora's social network project. It's an open source, completely free to use social network alternative, the Diaspora Project.

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, social networks that keep all its user data on a central server, Diaspora will allow users to create "seeds" or personalized Web servers. People joining Diaspora's social network will share personal data securely over GPG.

Diaspora attracted worldwide attention amidst Facebook's privacy issues and users' outburst over their personal data, earlier this year. The Diaspora Project should interest social network users who are uneasy with sharing their personal data on sites like Facebook.