Facebook is now the reigning king of the social networking sites on the web at present after dethroning rival MySpace, but there are many other social networking sites still with plenty of popularity. A new project called Diaspora has emerged and is billing itself as an open source social networking platform that will be what many consider to be ‘anti Facebook’. The software is set to be released in mid September 2010 and was invented by a group of software programming students at the New York University. The group managed to raise $200,000 in micro financing by getting small chunks of money from a large amount of people. Even though it was considered to be essentially vapor ware, a term used for software that is essentially an idea rather than even in the beta testing phases, it managed to get a huge amount of press thanks to the problems Facebook has had recently in regards to privacy concerns. Experts believe that while it will take time to prove the viability of Diaspora, if the team is as good at programming as they are at marketing, this could be huge for the social networking world.
While the software may or may not change the way that users interface with the web, it is definitely a strong showing for micro financing and public interest in software projects designed to meet social needs, say experts. If Diaspora enjoys even limited success, considering the vast number of rivals it has from BuddyPress to Ning, it would be a good sign for those developing future open source social networks.