Facebook Rival Raises $200K Without a Single Line of Code

Posted 06/03/2010 at 3:36pm | by Pulkit Chandna

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The latest crop of Facebook rivals is not driven by monetary ambitions but more altruistic causes. These efforts at snubbing the world's most popular social network site are being spearheaded by those aggrieved or even outraged by Facebook's actions.

A group of four students from NYU’s Courant Institute are in for a busy summer, with their concept of a “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network” having received $200,000 from nearly 6500 backers on fundraising site Kickstarter.com. Their still-to-be-coded network is called Diaspora.

Once you take into account the fact that all this money was raised sans any proof of concept, it becomes clear that people are beginning to take their online privacy very seriously. The idea behind Diaspora is to  have individuals host their personal data themselves  (either on a local machine or rented server), with each machine being called a 'seed.'

“Friend another seed and the two of you can synchronize over a direct and secure connection instead of through a superfluous hub. Encryption (privacy nerds: we’re using GPG) will ensure that no matter what kind of content is being transferred, you can share privately,” the New York-based quartet explained on the project's website. “Eventually, today’s hubs could be almost entirely replaced by a decentralized network of truly personal websites.”

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg remains unperturbed, though. He told Wired that even he lent a helping hand to the Diaspora project but stopped short of revealing the exact amount.

Another controversy-spawned rival is MillatFacebook, which identifies itself as a “social networking place for Muslims and others.” A group of six Pakistani IT professionals launched the site following  a court order banning Facebook in that country. The ban was imposed after the court held that certain content on the social networking was blasphemous.

Image Credit: JoinDiaspora.com