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Okay first of all, I'm glad that a bunch of undergrads from my school were able to raise $200k, get a lot of press, and build something. This alone should get a community of people around the project fixing bugs, etc. I've always been saying that making a distributed social network is much easier than "solving" privacy and security for such a thing. First of all, try even defining what it means to privately share things with people on the internet. Then, realize that most solutions (such as diaspora) will actually EXACERBATE the privacy problem, by making you trust the hosting services of all your friends instead of just facebook. That said, after diaspora was announced it made me think about whether it's possible to ensure privacy in principle. Meaning, is it possible to only trust YOUR hosting company and friends, and cut out every other middleman from being able to snoop your data? I came up with something which I think would be very useful, and I actually submitted a provisional patent for the technology, which basically enables distributed AND private social networking using just today's web browsers. If you want to check it out or get involved, see http://myownstream.com . This is an open-source offshoot of a social network I'm building, which I hope to release next year. You can see the roadmap there, but so far it's been going really well :) |