Diaspora The Open Source Facebook Killer Coming Sept 15th

Facebook is without doubt, the biggest social network out there. It’s unrivaled by the likes of linkedin, myspace and bebo in this day and age and is easily the most visited site on the web. It seems like it’s too big to take down, but that’s not going to deter some students from New York University.

Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy are the creators of Diaspora, the open-source social network that they are hoping will take down Facebook. They describe Diaspora as a “distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy.”

The recently announced in a blog post that Diaspora is set to hit the web on September 15th.

“We have been coding. We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15,”

So how is it different from Facebook? Well, the main difference is there will be a lot more privacy and you can control what gets shared with who and how much you want them to know about. All the information is stored on your machine, and not actually on a third party host or server. Your computer will be known as a “seed” and once it’s all set up, it will aggregate all of your information, like Facebook Profile, Tweets etc…. all in one place for you.

The main priority for the team is to make sure it’s as easy as possible for people to share only what they want and to maintain their privacy.

Diaspora has been completely funded by donations from individuals, and has managed to receive over $200,000 in funding to date, so some people must be interested in it.

We’ll see if it’s any good on Sept 15th anyway, and if you want to find out anything more about it, head over to join diaspora.