Diaspora – privacy in empty space

After we looked at some Google streetview alternatives and found no real ones last week let’s have a look at a supposed-to-be alternative to Facebook, called Diaspora. If you are involved with the social media or internet scene you most likely already heard about this project. If not, you’ll learn about it here. Diaspora is an open source project, announced April 24, in angry opposition to Facebook’s privacy rules. The 4 founders met at New York University and started to develop a concept which gives the user full control over their data.

Surprisingly the search for initial funding went way better than expected. It seems that a lot of people are concerned enough with privacy to fund the opposition to Facebook. With this financial backing they hit the road quite confidently and released the first alpha version for developers in September. Just 3 days ago they opened the system to the normal user on an invite base and created quite some buzz on Mashable and other big blogs. Let’s have a look.

Besides being brand new Diaspora doesn’t really make it easy to create activity and make connections. You can only search by username or Email address. Considering that your contacts are supposed to be sorted into close-to-secret-groups, called aspects, this is a laborious task. It’s a bit like trying to connect islands on the Pacific with a set of walky-talkies.

I have to admit that the project is in a very early stage and further developments are to be expected. Yet, calling Diaspora an alternative to Facebook is a far cry away from reality. Mark Zuckerberg, who actually added to the funding, certainly won’t have nightmares about Diaspora.

At the moment the lack of interaction and people will likely make the very well implemented option to delete your account the most used feature of the service. Sad but true.

Stephan de Paly