click on the image to go to their funding page

Inspired by a talk given by Columbia law professor Eben Moglen gave on internet privacy in February, four guys from NYU decided to build a social networking system that would be, “the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.”  It’s called Diaspora*.

From what I can discern from their website, they started a kickstarter funding project on April 24, and asked for $10,000.  It took them twelve days to reach that goal.  It’s now 2 days from the closing date of the funding effort and they have raised $191,963.

I’m excited and want to be on board.  I doubt it is a coincidence that Facebook rolled out a revamped privacy mechanism this past week.

If you are interested in being part of the effort to bring Diaspora to the Baruch community, please send me an email at rob-at-ibaruch.org.  We will do our best to arrange for students that need hosting services to receive it at no charge from ibaruch.org.

I feel lucky to have stumbled upon this!  I completely missed the New York Times article about Diaspora earlier this month.  I am stoked to see what the possibilities are!

This comic from xkcd.com really does sum up the whole privacy thing, too:

This just seems odd, and not really for the suicides, but why Al Jazeera thought it was a worthwhile story, and The Week picked it up in their email broadcast today. Seems anti-American-propaganda-y.

Google Wave is now open to anyone who wishes to register for it.  Get updates at googlewave.blogspot.com, or register at wave.google.com.  I haven’t used it in about two months – it was excruciating.  But I like the idea.  Zenbe’s Shareflow is much simpler, but that lack of complexity made it easier for me and the people I was collaborating with to hit the ground running.  There’s a free version, so check it out if you need to collaborate for a project that doesn’t lend itself to emailing back and forth.  (Note, Google Wave is live and real-time, whereas Zenbe isn’t.)

icyte

Google Docs (ho hum?)

Microsoft Office has document sharing online.

Google Wave (confusing)

Zoho Office (just fancy)

iwork.com (run your Keynote presentation via browser!)

Thinkfree Office – low cost office suite works off and on line

prezi.com (an example of some of the more exotic tools out there.)