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Zuckerberg donated to Diaspora, the open-source Facebook competitor
You'd think Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg would be dismissive of Diaspora, the upstart effort to provide an open-source Facebook alternative, but Zuck says that's not true. In fact, he donated to the crowd-funded Diaspora project via Kickstarter. Although the amount he donated is unknown, the Facebook founder told Wired he saw himself in the Diaspora kids, who are current NYU students.My take is that Zuckerberg doesn't feel threatened by Diaspora, and that he might actually see it as an incubator for new ideas that Facebook can use to push its agenda of opening the Web. [See Microsoft bailing out Apple back in 1997! -Ed] It also wouldn't be surprising to see Zuckerberg make an attempt to hire the Diaspora team at some point, although I doubt they'd be swayed by the offer. Including Zuckerberg's donation, Diaspora has raised nearly $200,000 on Kickstarter.
For more on Diaspora, check out Download Squad's point-counterpoint series: Why Diaspora Will Win and Why Diaspora Will Fail.
Comments
1
Subscribe to commentsDrew GreenMay 31st 2010 2:22PM
I agree with the point about their staff/ideas being used for Facebook. I don't see Diaspora going anywhere. The idea behind it is too geeky/technical for the average user. Most people don't care about/understand the security issues with Facebook and are certainly not in any position to host their own profile on their own local server/hosted server. Us in the tech community are only aware of the FB issues because they are being so heavily publicized on tech sites. The bulk of FB users don't have an issue. I bet I could ask one of my many hundred FB friends and I'd probably be the only one aware of the security problems that have been brought up. The Diaspora project will certainly fail (or at most see minimal success).