Diaspora might give Facebook a run for its money... or at least its creators hope so.The social network has been identified as a potential competitor for Facebook, and is an open source social network. The project developers have said that the social network will be up and ready to launch on Sept. 15.
The company was founded during the controversy of Facebook's privacy controls, and they tackle that issue as part of their marketing. On their site joindiaspora.com they say this, "The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network."
Diaspora is for users to download the software package, and then install it on their own website. And for users that are not interested in hosting their own Diaspora site, there will be a basic sigh-up version as well.
Diaspora is the brain child of four New York University students, and was originally intended to be just a summer project. But the project gained media attention, and funding from Kickstarter, and now here it is. Two of the four founders won't be returning to school this semester in order to focus on business development.
Funny enough, they have created a Facebook fan page advertising their site, and it has over 22,000 fans, and they have accumulated over 37,000 followers on Twitter. But the real question is: Will anything ever truly give Facebook a challenge? Facebook currently has over 500 million users.
The answer is likely a no.
