Owning our digital lives - Diaspora and the next step in social media.

Privacy or connectedness?: That’s a choice we all have to make as we explore the various social media channels to connect with our friends, family and meet new peopleBut can these two co-exist? Is it possible to build a social network on the internet where we are in control of our personal data and still be able to participate?That’s the question that four computer science students from NYU set out to explore, and Diaspora was born. According to their Kickstarter project’s page, the idea was born over late night conversations about freedom and ownership online (us geeks are like that). From this, Diaspora - the privacy-aware, personally-controlled, do-it-all distributed open-source social network was born.Most social networks today work in a centralized model. We sign in to a network and upload information about ourselves. A live stream of our lives is then handed over to a server somewhere. Once it’s out there, this information is no longer ours. There is a conflict between our privacy and the business interests of the companies running these networks.Facebook is the largest network that exists and these statistics show how it’s become such an intrinsic part of our online and offline lives. Every time Facebook changes the default privacy setting, we grudgingly change the settings again – and stay, mainly because we don’t want to lose contact with our friends. Have a look at this great infographic on the evolution of privacy on Facebook.So what makes diaspora better? Instead of all our information being stored in a centralized location by one network, Diaspora is a distributed network where separate computers connect to each other. Each computer where you store your information is called a “seed” and it can also integrate your information from other services like your Facebook, Twitter and even your RSS feeds.Diaspora is being developed in a model similar to Wordpress. You can get this open-source software to install on your own servers to set up your own networks. For those of us who are not that technical, Diaspora will offer a turn-key solution like Wordpress.com where it’s all pre-installed and it’s an easy to register and start using the service.The open-source code for Diapora was released on Gitbub recently and there are a number of demonstration communities setup where you can sign up to explore.So whether this is really the “Facebook Killer” it's been billed as, kind of doesn't matter. The point is that if we drift away from Facebook, as they did from Myspace, Friendster and the other networks before them, we leave our personal data and communities behind.  If Facebook or linked-In shut down tomorrow, you could lose everything you've ever posted to your profile. And that's a big deal considering that for some, these networks have all but replaced things like business card files, photo albums, letter writing and diaries.Rather than be the death of Facebook, a diaspora-type service is more likely to simply shrink its dominance - with all your information and communities aggregated and stored on your space on the internet, it will be easier, safer and more valuable for you to move on from the big networks and explore the next big thing.That is what is most exciting about Diaspora - the idea of having our space on the internet, free from the commercial interests of corporations, so we benefit from everything that social offers.Here's a video of the founders talking about Diaspora:What do you think about Diaspora? Is it a viable idea? Will it the Facebook Killer? What are the potential pitfalls?