Late last night, word began to spread around the tech community that one of Diaspora‘s four co-founders, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, had passed away. With much sadness, we’ve now confirmed this terrible news with the Diaspora team.
The news is incredibly jarring, to the point that much else I could say escapes me. Ilya was just 22. To see any member of our community pass is sad, but for one so young to… → Read More
It’s been over a year since Diaspora raised over $200,000 towards the creation of an alternative, decentralized social network. It was less than three months later that the first screenshots of their project hit the web, but since then — well, it would be disingenuous to say we haven’t heard anything (they sent out alpha invites just last month, for instance), but they sure haven’t been… → Read More
Facebook just raised $1.5 billion at a $50 billion valuation, having secured just south of $2.4 billion since the company was founded.
Contrast that with The Appleseed Project, which aims to establish an open source, fully distributed and decentralized social networking software suite to rival Facebook.
I just got an email from the project’s lead developer, Michael Chisari, prompting me to… → Read More
Editor’s note: This is the third of a three-part guest post by venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners on “Social Networking: The Past, Present, And Future.” Read Part I and Part II first.
In my first post I talked about the history of social networking from 1985-2002 dominated by CompuServe, AOL & Yahoo! In the second post I explored the current era which covers Web 2.0 (blogs… → Read More
Now that Diaspora, which is building an open-source distributed social network, has launched in private alpha, I figured it’d be a good idea to remind you that there are several alternatives to that particular Facebook alternative, some of which have been around longer and in more advanced stages of development.
Note that there may be more initiatives that I haven’t heard of or simply didn’t or… → Read More
We’ve talked a lot about Diaspora, the open-source Facebook-alternative, in recent months. One of the reasons for that is the massive success they had raising money on the crowdsourced fund-raising site, Kickstarter. The project raised over $200,000 from nearly 6,500 backers in just 39 days. Now a new project has already blown that tally out of the water: an iPod nano-based multi-touch wristwatch… → Read More
We’ve been tracking the progress of Diaspora, the open-source Facebook alternative, since before the project even started. That’s because the idea got so much buzz on the crowdsourced micro-funding site Kickstarter, that they were able to turn a goal of raising $10,000 in 39 days into $200,000 from 6,500 backers in the same timeframe. But with such high expectations, you have to deliver. And many… → Read More
Project Diaspora. The open source Facebook-killa. You know the one. Developers got a taste of it last month. And the rest of us were supposed to get a usable alpha build this month. Well, there are only two days left in this month. So it’s shouldn’t be too surprising that they’re pushing the consumer release again.
In a post pointing out some of the progress being made today, the Diaspora team… → Read More
A post has just gone up on Diaspora’s blog revealing what the project actually looks like for the first time. While it’s not yet ready to be released to the public, the open-source social networking project is giving the world a glimpse of what it looks like today and also releasing the project code, as promised.
At first glance, this preview version of Diaspora looks sparse, but clean. Oddly… → Read More
A few days ago, we noted that Diaspora was three weeks away from unveiling their open-source Facebook alternative. But a small update today clarifies one important point. On September 15, Diaspora will release the open source code for the project. But it won’t be until October that the first consumer-facing alpha is available.
This isn’t a major hiccup, it’s just an update to make sure people… → Read More
Remember Diaspora? You’ll be forgiven if you don’t. Since they received a lot of hype as the open-source “Facebook Alternative” this past May, they’ve been quiet. In fact, they hadn’t given any updates on their progress since early July. But today they’ve re-emerged with some updates. Notably, they say: “We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th.” That’s… → Read More
It’s been exactly one month after Diaspora, which aims to become an open Facebook alternative (much like OneSocialWeb and others) raised just over $200,000 in funding from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others through Kickstarter.
Since then, it’s been quiet, but the team of four NYU students has been making some progress in actually building the system. → Read More
When Diaspora set out to raise money to build an open Facebook alternative site, they had a pretty modest goal: $10,000. Of course, they were raising the funds through a less than traditional means — using Kickstarter, an online fundraising site. Still, they shot past that goal in 12 days. And within 20 days, they had raised over $100,000. Yesterday, the fundraising closed, the final tally: just… → Read More
For all the attention the Diaspora project has been getting, largely thanks to the New York Times, another alternative called OneSocialWeb has been desperately trying to raise even just a couple of eyebrows.
Which is frustrating to them, they say, because the goals of both projects are perfectly aligned, while OneSocialWeb is self-reportedly much further ahead of Diaspora in many ways.
So what… → Read More
Whenever a service rises to popularity, an “open” alternative is usually close behind. The problem is that most of these alternatives never go anywhere, let along get close to the service they’re trying to supplant. But the rate at which Diaspora*, the open project hoping to be the new Facebook, is gaining funding is getting too big to ignore.
The New York Times profiled the NY-based project… → Read More
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