Open Facebook Alternatives Gain Momentum, $115K

“When Wired.com called for an open alternative to Facebook last
Friday, lamenting the company’s untrammeled desire to control your
online identity and reconfigure the world’s privacy norms, reader
response was overwhelming, with hundreds of comments and
ironically, thousands of “Like” votes on Facebook.

“Now, a group of four New York University students — who
were working on just what we called for — have harnessed that
dissatisfaction in the form of more than $115,000 in crowdsourced
funding for their distributed, social networking system called
Diaspora. That’s the equivalent of a significant angel round of
funding in the internet startup world, and their fundraising on the
Kickstarter crowdsourced funding site has another 19 days to
go.

“It’s also an impressive for a project proposal from four
students who say they aren’t going to start coding until they
graduate from college this summer. And a testament to how strongly
that a growing number of people want an alternative to a
centralized and dominant social networking site.”

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