WASHINGTON (AFP) – – Four US students who launched a new social networking site called “Diaspora” are stressing its ease of use and stricter privacy policy, in a bid to make waves in a field dominated by Facebook.
The version available to software developers since Wednesday is giving outsiders an opportunity to work on applications within its framework, ahead of a public launch due at a yet undisclosed later date.
“This is now a community project and development open to anyone with the technical expertise who shares the vision of a social network that puts users in control,” said the founders at the project site http://www.joindiaspora.com.
Billed as the “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network,” New York University programmers Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy showed off the site’s sleek white and gray interface with icons representing users, much like on Facebook.
Emphasis on privacy appears as a direct pull for the many complaints made about its giant rival in the field, and may serve as a tool to attract discontented users from Facebook’s half-billion-strong population.
To set up Diaspora, the students made an appeal in May for donations through the site Kickstater.com, a platform for projects to find investors.
Successful in their efforts, the founders collected over 200,000 dollars, including input from, mysteriously, Facebook boss and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.
There are so many social networks around right now to name. And I could not believe the amount of accounts that my buddy has signed up. Sometimes I do wonder how he keep up with all of them, if he did.
After much negative publicity about their privacy issues. Facebook’s CEO finally decided to speak up on his blog, followed by the change on the site. Here are the two links detailing the issues :
Facebook has certainly been in the spotlight lately in regards to its privacy issue. So what a CEO to do when that happens? He speaks to the press, The Washington Post to be exact.
This article shows that there is more to Facebook than just poking your friends, using it for business purposes, and for entertainment purposes. There lives that has been changed because of it.
Facebook, the giant social network now under fire over its privacy practices, has been sending personal information to online advertising companies without its users’ consent, according to a Harvard Business School professor who filed a letter of complaint with the Federal Trade Commission Thursday.
GLOBAL – Synapse, a division of Time Inc, is collaborating with e-commerce developer Alvenda to allow Facebook users to buy print magazine subscriptions via Facebook news feeds.
