A New Fish in the Social Media Sea

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Just when you thought it was safe to get back into the Social Media water, along comes Diaspora.

Move over FaceBook. Diaspora is about to test the social media water.

As reported in News.com.au, October will see four students from New York challenge the world’s largest online social network by launching what is being billed as a “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network.”

After hearing a law professor describe social media as “spying for free”, Max Salberg, Dan Grippi, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy decided to start building their own networking site and Diaspora – pronounced Die-as-poe-ra – was born.

While details on how Diaspora will function aren’t readily available, it is known that users will be able to build their own social network starting with a ‘seed’”.  From here, they can add their own networks called ‘hubs’, and, in turn, can control exactly what information goes to what hub.

So those wild photos of the party you had on the weekend that you want to share with your friends –  but not with your workmates – will stay amongst friends only.

“Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your Facebook profile, tweets, anything,” the team wrote on their blog in April.  The creators are also keen to create a user interface that is at automated as possible, so that users will “not notice deciding” what information should be shared with which hub.

The idea behind Diaspora is definitely taking the next step in the social media evolutionary process, building upon FaceBook’s fairly depthless method of information sharing and it has been hailed as the “Anti-FaceBook.”    There’s no doubt that its launch will definitely be boosted by the negative publicity FaceBook has received throughout the year about its own lax attitude towards privacy.

However, whether Diaspora works remains to be seen.  And whether Diaspora can entice a large enough number of FaceBook’s 500 million users to start over in yet another social media platform to really have any impact on its social media stronghold is another question.

Article by Elisabeth Lambert

Elisabeth is an editor and content creator for The Media Pad, publishers of Power Retail. As a writer and blogger, she is rapt that she is able to channel her passion for online retailing into Power Retail. She also loves writing about rugby, pop culture, travel and anything baby related. Having spent most of the last decade in Japan, Elisabeth still immerses herself in as much Japanese crazy as possible, and when she has time, Elisabeth likes to cook, ski and train for triathlons.