I have a few invites, for those of you who want to play with this. First come, first served.
Udhay http://mashable.com/2010/11/24/diaspora-preview/ Hands-on With Facebook Alternative Diaspora [PICS] Following a release of initial source code back in September, the first group of private alpha invites for Facebook alternative Diaspora were released to users on Tuesday. Mashable managed to snag some invites and has put together a gallery to show you the service and how it looks right now. The story behind Diaspora, which was started by four New York University students, goes back about six months to the first Facebook privacy crisis of the summer. Disillusioned with the social networking giant’s privacy settings (or lack thereof), the Diaspora team decided to try to do something different. Using Kickstarter, the team hoped to raise $10,000 so that they could start working on the project over the summer. In the end, the guys ended up raising just more than $200,000. Of course, six months is a long time in Internet time. The public backlash over Facebook’s privacy gaffes have largely died down — it seems to be an accepted necessary evil of being social in this day and age. The source code was summarily panned by much of the tech elite, but the developers claim to have taken the criticism to heart. Now that alpha invites are going out, how does the service stack up? Potential For Change or Disappointment? We want to be fair to Diaspora by noting that the service is in the very beginning stages of a private alpha. Thus, we’re not going to be too critical of the service’s lack of features — or the fact that attempting to log in using Safari will crash the browser, full-stop, every single time. <snip> -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
