Social media is fragile right now. The Facebook IPO failure (which followed several less-publicized failures by other social media sites) has investors questioning the validity of pouring money into social startups. The model went from unproven to disproven in many ways over the last couple of years after the disastrous turns that sites like MySpace, Digg, and AOL’s Netscape/Propeller took after promising starts. The news that Diaspora’s founders have “moved on” puts another black eye on the face of social media. At some point, they’re going to run out of eyes to blacken. What makes this less…

Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy, far left in the image above, has died. This story is developing as there is no news on the cause of death. Diaspora, which mean “the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland” or “people dispersed by whatever cause to more than one location,” made news last year when four NYU students decided to take on Facebook by offering a more private social networking experience. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg even donated to their cause. We will update this story as more is learned….

I could say it feels like only yesterday I was introducing you guys to Diaspora, but that would very much be a lie. Honestly, it feels more like it’s been 13 years. For those of you just joining us, Diaspora is the ‘privacy-aware’ social network that debuted in concept several months ago, amidst the zenith of Facebook’s privacy woes. And it seemed like perfect timing; with everyone getting their hate on for Facebook and its alleged disregard for user privacy, most people agreed it was time for a change. Diaspora seemed like mana from heaven, offering true privacy and the ability to exact complete…

If you’re at all a social network enthusiast, you’re probably interested in – or at least peripherally familiar with – Diaspora, the would-be Facebook killer that’s been the belle of the social networking debutante ball since its Kickstarter account went nuclear. Last evening, Diaspora’s source code was released to developers (well, everyone, but I for one am a little coding-dumb), and the public at large was finally given a glimpse of the (possible) future of social networking. For the moment, it looks a hell of a lot like Facebook. Honestly, that’s not a bad thing. Facebook’s got the right…

If you hate Facebook, mark the date September 15th in your calendar. The guys from Diaspora, the anti-Facebook, have announced that their product is ready to ship and will be open sourced in mid-September. The software began life as a Kickstarter project looking for $10,000 and ended up pulling in $200,642, allegedly including a donation by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Various alternatives to Facebook exist, but none provide the same full circle of social connectivity. Diaspora has the lofty goal of capturing what people love about Facebook while completely alleviating the security and…

When faced with competition, most of us would get our defenses up and carefully eye our new rivals from a distance, secretly hoping for a massive failure on their part. Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg may be an example for us all in the way he embraces his possible competitors. The Diaspora project, being worked on by four NYU students, is to be an open alternative to the social media giant Facebook that includes a way for people to run their own servers. Instead of turning a blind eye, Zuckerberg actually donated money to the new project; adding to the $190,000 the students had already raised….

Facebook is one of those things you hate yourself for using, but you keep using it and hating yourself because, well, it’s easy and fun and everyone else is using it. But what if there was an alternative? What if there was a Facebook clone that was open source, privacy aware and personally controlled by you? What if, and I can’t imagine the sweet words are leaving my lips, what if there were no Farmville, Mafia Wars or Zooville? Diaspora is a Kickstarter project that aims to do all of the above, and people are voting with their wallets – the project was asking for $10,000 funding and the current total is…