Ever Wondered About…Diaspora?

By Kate Spiers

What is it?

In its own words, Diaspora is the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all open source social network. Strapline: Decentralize the web.  This is a timely mission, given current debate around privacy and control online.

It will work like this: Each user has a ‘seed’ which they own and host where they choose. Seeds will be able to connect directly to others, rather than via a mid-way platform where privacy is surrendered in any way.  The seed aggregates all of your information (FB updates, pictures, blog posts, tweets etc) and you can share with whomever you like over a direct and secure connection. More power to you.

So yes, it will snap at the heels of Facebook in particular.  Recent privacy issues with Facebook make this a truly viable alternative for those who have voted with their feet and jumped ship, or who plan to. The promise of full power over your data could surely not have come at a better time…

Why should I care?

So many reasons:

Diaspora goes live on 15 September as an open-source developer release, with the alpha consumer version launching in October, so expect plenty of build up and analysis – there’s no getting away from this baby.

Super-interesting to us on 2 major counts:

1. It’s a Kickstarter project, crowdfunded on a spectacular scale.  The initial $10 000 goal was swiftly surpassed and a total of 6479 backers pledged over $200 000. There is appetite for this in spades.  But backing the project with $50 is different to investing our time, effort and trust in a brand new platform. The rate of adoption will be the true measure.
2. A new way of sharing online comes to the fore.  How will this affect the rest of the centralised web? Is the mood turning? Will Facebook lose users and how will it respond? One way or another, we suspect Diaspora will make its mark.

Anything else I should know?

This is the work of a group of 4 NYU computer science students, Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy.

The group was inspired to create Diaspora by a February 5, 2010 speech by Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen to the Internet Society’s New York Chapter, “Freedom in the Cloud”, in which Moglen described centralized social networks as “spying for free.”

Features will include: Secure filesharing, instant messaging, VoIP, encrypted backups and OpenID.

Ever Wondered About is a new series on the Wisdom London blog, where Kate Spiers and Jill Ruthenberg aim to demystify and explore what’s shaping our social interactions.  Coming up: Ning, Paper.li and PPC.  Wondering about anything else?  Tell us and we’ll investigate!

Have you Ever Wondered About….Audioboo? Click to wonder no more.

Vive La Revolution! (Bastille-inspired post on Disruption)

I posted on the 5 Essentials of Disruption a few months ago and I’m revisiting the subject because something brilliant is happening, which I think we’ll see more of. Several industries are seeing the potential for a revolution, through disruptive services, and ways of designing and delivering them.

Disruption is happening at the development / product / service level and it’s making the marketing world a really interesting place.  What’s more, it’s underpinning the maxim that marketing is, and should be, ingrained in the business strategy…and it’s heartening that we are seeing that.  So what’s happening?  Here are what I think are some of the most exciting examples:

Disruptive Service

The retail banking world is in for a shake-up later this month when Metro Bank launches in London.  It’s the first high-street banking brand to be launched in over 100 years and from the very outset they are disrupting the status quo.  Bucking the trend of recent years, Metro Bank wants their customers to visit their branches, and they can do that 7 days a week.  They also want their clients to have fun and aim to deliver a genuine experience on every visit. Kids will be entertained with lollipops and coin-counting machines, pens will be unchained and free, dogs even will get biscuits, apparently.

Plans are pretty ambitious too – 4 sites are due to open this year, and a further 10 in 2011.  It remains to be seen how much of a success this will be, but what’s fascinating is the ballsy ambition to act less like a bank and be, first and foremost, a service and experience provider.

Disruptive Product and Delivery

Call Britannia was launched in 2009 with the aim of creating 10, 000 jobs across Britain for the unemployed, by providing training ‘incubators’ whereby skills acquisition and personal development are put to the forefront, resulting in trained and motivated staff for on-shore call centres. Karen Darby, who founded Call Britannia, is not, by nature, one to simply accept the status quo. The proposition to businesses unashamedly challenges the trend for offshore call centre staff and combining this with the benefit of a greater social good being achieved.  It’s not for everyone – and Call Britannia know that – but their bold intentions are very much in tune with growing customer frustration at non-UK call centre service, and now the need for jobs in UK.

Disruptive Development

Probably one of the most high-profile examples of disruptive activity is Diaspora, the “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network”. Disruptive in 2 major ways – first, it aims to ‘decentralise the web’ by providing aggregation of information without surrendering privacy, at a time when Facebook in particular had sparked a public debate (and much negative feeling) about online privacy and ownership of information. Second, Diaspora is ‘crowdfunded’ via Kickstarter – and it clearly struck a chord.  6479 backers pledged over $200 000 (the original aim was a more modest $10 000) within the space of a few months. Taking on the big boys is a bold move, but was perfectly timed.

The “so what?”

• What all of these examples have in common is that they have tapped into a mood – not a business trend or economic direction, but a human, consumer/user-driven mood. They are responding to people and what’s bugging them.
• They’re originals.  They’re not following a tried-and-tested route, or adhering to conventional wisdom.
• They have a clear mission that’s beyond a business objective and which will remain at their core. In each case, it’s to do with making people’s lives better and easier.
• They’re bold.

The trick for all of these revolutionaries now will be to stay with the mood that they have identified and reacted to, and to ensure that they continue to connect with it as the world changes.. and as the needs and priorities of the people change too.  We’re rooting for them. Vive la revolution!

Kate Spiers is founder of Wisdom London. Follow on Twitter for more like this, in tasty bite-sized pieces.