After
the long standing browser wars and the still continuing Operating
Systems war , we are now at an epochal internet phase where the
Social Networks are competing vigorously with each other.
From
the Myspace days of celebrity social networks, to the now almost
oblivious Orkut, social networking has had its course of
metamorphosis. But, the credit of making Social networking a global
phenomenon undoubtedly rests with The Social Network-
Facebook. With all its flaws and contentions, Facebook boasts of a
humungous user base, and stands third in the global population index,
only after China and India!
When
such is the reach of social networks, the crucial nuances pertaining
to the fangs of the Internet like privacy, security and freedom for
the users are little spoken about by the mass of the users, or are at
least kept obscure to the users by the major players.
Privacy and Centralised
Social Networks:
Prof.Eben
Moglen calls monopoly networks, or the centralised social networks
like Facebook, and the recent Google Plus, as large spying
machines, and so, for valid
reasons. Users have voluntarily surrendered intimate and delicate
data to corporations like Facebook and Google, respectively. With the
increase of the un-freedom in the internet, there are high chances of
misuse of this data by the corporations either for profit or for
information gathering, without the full consent or understanding of
the users using their services.
Looking back at the initial days of the Internet, when conceived it
was an autonomous conglomeration of end user machines present at the
edge of the network. It was decentralized, free (as in freedom) and
neutral (as in unbiased). But this fundamental trait of the Internet
has eroded substantially, rendering the Internet vulnerable to severe
censorship and manipulation by the big players of the Web.
Social Networks, give a comprehensive case study of all that the
Internet was supposed to do, and is somewhere failing to do.
Diaspora
: The Distributed and contextual social networking,
mode of online socializing has
been unleashed by the Free Software community. This will hopefully
try to emancipate the Social Networking aspect of the Internet.
Knowing
the perils of the devils:
Privacy: The privacy terms of be it Facebook or Google Plus
are apart from being obscure, ultimately end up conveying the fact
that the users' data will be not be given the discretion it
deserves, on the contrary will be traded with third parties.
Security: The fiascoes of account crackings, floods of spams
and unsafe content on these networks is certainly worth severe
scrutiny.
Data ownership: Even when the users have deleted their
account, there is no guarantee that the users' data is off the
servers, and in many cases it still resides there.
Mandates: Users are at the mercy of the corporations for the
features and applications which flock the users' profiles, with
little or no role to the users in setting up the framework of their
social network. Ex: The recent chat application updation in Facebook
has created a lot of disgruntle amongst the users, but there is
little that the users can do about it.
Google
Plus and its privacy policy
Mad Ads: Personalized marketing of products and services
using the personal data handed over by the users is a nuisance which
has certainly annoyed lots of users.
An
instance of a friend's personalized ad on FB!
Getting
to know Diaspora:
Diaspora
is the social network that puts you in control of your information.
You decide what you’d like to share, and with whom. You retain full
ownership of all your information, including friend lists, messages,
photos, and profile details. Diaspora
was kick started by four talented programmers from NYU Courant
Institute, after having heard Professor Eben Moglen talk about “lack
of privacy and free spying in the cloud”.
Diaspora doesn’t expose your information to advertisers, or to the
games you play, or to other websites you visit. It’s inherently
private.
Diaspora
is not a single site — it’s a collection of different sites, with
different URLs, run by different people. But they all run the same
software, and they all talk to each other. Each server is called a
“pod.” As the service grows, lots of these pods will join the
Diaspora network.
The official pod, run by
the project’s founders, is
http://joindiaspora.com.
Because Diaspora is a Free (as in freedom) Software,
these 'Pods' can be installed and run even on a personal computer,
and be made available to users on a small network for online
socializing, like they would on any other centralized social
networks. Also, as the source is available the users are free to
tinker aroud with the features and share the modified updates!
Diaspora, by the virtue of
being a Distributed Social Network, ensures privacy while still
keeping the users connected and, not connectedness at the cost of
privacy like in the major centralized social networks. With Diaspora,
users will be reclaiming all their data, get connected on secure
social connections, while sharing the data at their own terms.
Future of
the Social Network Wars:
With
the arrival of Google Plus, and the previous experience of failures
with Google Buzz and Google Wave, Google seems to have hit the right
chord this time around. Facebook-ers have been looking for an
alternative and Google Plus might offer that respite.
Diaspora,
although is the right antidote to the centralization of social
networks, it might not well the replacement to the centralized
mammoths like Facebook and the growing Google Plus. To envisage the
future of Diaspora, I might concur with a Diaspora friend-Peter
Rock-Lacroix, who on his blog writes the following:
“Putting
aside social pull and the goal of market power, I think the success
of Diaspora should be measured similarly to the goals of the GNU
Project. While advocates of software like the GNU/Linux operating
system enjoy hearing news of market success, they see the existence
of free software itself as the most important success, rather than
growing popularity. Maybe there will only ever be enough capital
behind Diaspora to sustain a niche market or perhaps, it will come to
the mass market. Regardless of that, even if a small network of users
exist who can run their own privacy-aware, free personal web server,
that’s a success too.”
In the next article, a feature wise comparison between
these social networks, along with the steps to install a Diaspora Pod
will be presented.
Raghavendra
S
(raghuarr@joindiaspora.com)
References:
