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.

It has been almost two years since the formation of the Open Web foundation. Back then Google, Facebook, MySpace and others joined this initiative for the provision of web technologies.

Open Web Foundation The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.

Two years later, Facebook launches OpenGraphProtocol.org under the Open Web Foundation Agreement. Now that’s what I call interesting!

The sure thing is that URL shortening services have been tremendously useful over the last year, especially with Twitter going nuts in 2009. Apart from that, they are very handy when it comes to mobiles and the mobile (r)evolution going on the last years. From TinyURL to Bit.ly people have trusted such services for tr.imming and sharing even the most obscure urls around the globe.

Well, after the huge success of TinyURL and Bit.ly now its time to get serious about this. According to Inside Facebook, Facebook has developed its own URL shortener in order to make its long urls more accessible. Moreover, Google announced a few hours ago its own URL shortener which only works for Google Toolbar and FeedBurner for the time being. As they said:

Google URL shortener is not a stand-alone service; you can’t use it to shorten links directly. Currently, Google URL Shortener is only available from the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner. If the service proves useful, we may eventually make it available for a wider audience in the future.

What if Google decided to make its own url shortener an open stand-alone service? What do you think?

[ photo via pagedooley ]

However rumors are flying over the air about a twitter-killer. meh.

The url of this new feature is http://lite.facebook.com

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