Quit Facebook, Join Diaspora?

After weeks of outrage and criticism over its handling of users' private data, and angry voices calling it quits, Facebook has finally heard the call and started getting its house in order. It has rolled out simplified privacy settings that online security watchdogs, industry experts, and a large chunk of its over 400 million users have been demanding for a long time.

As far as the Web is concerned, Facebook's plans are nothing short of world domination and it enjoys immense popularity as the largest social network in the world. While Facebook may have been applauded for its effort to start giving users increased control over their private data (which was expected of it in the first place), it isn't really quite there yet, and the air of mistrust surrounding it may take a long while to fade away.

In the wake of Facebook's privacy goof-ups (and enforced corrective measures), a new idea spurring four NYU undergrads seems different from the social networking giant in one key aspect: privacy. Their yet-unborn-brainchild? Diaspora. This is their attempt to make a "privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network," where the user never loses sight of his or her private data and has total control over it all the time.

Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have your personal data hosted on their servers, and many a times unsharing or deleting a piece of information isn't always as easy as you may think. This is where Diaspora fundamentally chooses to differ with popular existing social networks, wishing to allow its users complete control over their shared information and restore their online identity back to them without any fuss.

Speaking more technically, unlike existing social networking models based on client-server architecture -- where the end user is a 'client' and the social networking service the central 'server,' Diaspora aims to create "seeds" or personalized Web servers to store all your personal data (videos, photos, notes, etc.) and securely share it over GPG. There's no central master server controlling all your data, it's all decentralized. It will be like peer-to-peer, somewhat like Jabber.

"When you have a Diaspora seed of your own, you own your social graph, you have access to your information however you want, whenever you want, and you have full control of your online identity," reads a statement at Diaspora's Kickstarter page, where they managed to raise the required $10,000 to fund the social networking project within twelve days of request. At the time of writing this piece, 5945 independent backers have pledged $190,000 behind Diaspora's vision.

Daniel Grippi (21), Maxwell Salzber (22), Raphael Sofaer (19), and Ilya Zhitomirkskiy (20) are the combined brains behind the Diaspora Project. Team Diaspora's immediate short term plan is to create the Diaspora framework by the summer's end. It will have an encrypted protocol that is secured every step of the way, a datastore that can keep all your shared items in one single location -- that way it is easy to pull the plug and drain all information out, if required. And Diaspora wants you to be the keepers of your own data and your own OpenID provider.

You can't join Diaspora just yet. In fact there is no tangible piece of software to test drive but the group plans to release Project Diaspora's first version by September this year. Is this the answer to Facebook's privacy gaffes? Certainly not. Diaspora hasn't even taken off yet, and this is still part of its think tank's summer project, so it's too early to answer conclusively. But given a strong collective sentiment against Facebook currently, it will be interesting to see if Diaspora's stab at redefining popular social networks and respecting user data takes off eventually.