Open Source Facebook Competitor, Diaspora*, Launches in Two Weeks

Diaspora* is an open source project that was launched a few months ago where they initially tried to raise just $10,000 via Kickstarter.com so that these four guys could develop their Facebook competitor. They ended up getting around $180,000 instead – including some money (apparently) from Facebook’s own Mark Zuckerberg.

The deal with Diaspora is that it’s an open source site where users will be part of it, including development, it would seem. They’re also very aware of privacy issues and wants to keep user data safe and encrypted, even adding the possibility for users to store their data elsewhere, like on a server in your own house.

I don’t know about this. Sure I’ll try it out cause I’m no big fan of all the data mining that Facebook has going on, but I’m not so sure that Diaspora ever will become as big as Facebook or Twitter. The name also just doesn’t sound that good to me, I don’t know if they really want the site to be called Diaspora or if it’s just the project (“diaspora” is greek for “a scattering [of seeds]”).

What do you think, is Diaspora the site to take down Facebook or will it mostly be a geeky alternative? Leave a comment below!