Richard Martin Blog: Facebook Backlash Fuels Diaspora

The launch of Apple’s music-centric social network, Ping (not to be confused with the golf-club manufacturer, or the search engine created by the world’s largest software maker, or the Boulder, Colo. hair salon) has given new emphasis to the rising Facebook backlash. Blogger Richi Jennings, on PCWorld, rounded up some of the strongest anti-Facebook rants.

“Over the past month, [Facebook founder] Mark Zuckerberg, the hottest new card player in town, has overplayed his hand," wrote Jason Calacanis. “Facebook is officially ... uncool, amongst partners, parents and pundits."

Added Krishnan Subramanian, on CloudAve.com, “I strongly feel that Facebook has gone rogue."

Inevitably, this backlash has led to the emergence of Facebook rivals, “a wave of social networking sites that define themselves in opposition to Facebook," as Adrianne Jeffries put it in this terrific roundup on ReadWriteWeb. The most interesting of these is Diaspora (as in, a distributed community of refugees fleeing an oppressive overlord – get it?). Built on open source software, Diaspora was formed for people who want out of "large corporate networks who want to tell you that sharing and privacy are mutually exclusive." The network will insure that control over all user data remains with the users themselves – what a concept! Diaspora is not a Web site, per se: it’s “a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly." Hmm – sounds like the Internet, to me.

“Decentralizing lets us reconstruct our ‘social graphs’ so that they belong to us," wrote co-founder Maxwell Salzberg, in the project’s manifesto. “Our real social lives do not have central managers, and our virtual lives do not need them."

One of Diaspora’s primary features, when it goes live later this month, will be “an intuitive way for users to decide, and not notice deciding, what content goes to their coworkers and what goes to their drinking buddies." In other words, all those poor saps who’ve gotten fired because of beer-bong photos on Facebook: this is the social network for you!