diaspora (origin: Greek, διασπορά – “a scattering [of seeds]“) is a project which is mainly about privacy and social networks. As it states itself, diaspora is the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.

Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy. We call these computers ‘seeds’. A seed is owned by you, hosted by you, or on a rented server. Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your facebook profile, tweets, anything. We are designing an easily extendable plugin framework for Diaspora, so that whenever newfangled content gets invented, it will be automagically integrated into every seed.

diaspora is the birth child of four NYU computer science students: Daniel Grippi, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Raphael Sofaer and Maxwell Salzberg. It is currently hosted on Kickstarter and the software will be released at the end of the summer under aGPL (Affero General Public License).

Here are some key features coming to diaspora this summer:

• Full-fledged communications between Seeds (Diaspora instances)
• Complete PGP encryption
• External Service Scraping of most major services (reclaim your data)
• Version 1 of Diaspora’s API with documentation
• Public GitHub repository of all Diaspora code

Privacy

Since the start of this year, a lot of stuff has been going on around privacy on the web. I think that privacy is an integral part of the web as we know it and this is why I believe diaspora is so important right now. Especially now that social networks are even more centralized. I really liked it when I read this regarding diaspora.

We believe that privacy and connectedness do not have to be mutually exclusive.

ReadWriteWeb refers to diaspora as an ambitious undertaking to build an “anti-Facebook”. Though I am not sure if diaspora will ever manage to be a successful “anti-Facebook”, I am curious to see what will happen to this initiative by the end of this year.

Read more about diaspora here.