Some of you might have heard about Diaspora – the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network (www.joindiaspora.com). Did the founders of Diaspora do the right action at the time, then?
Back in April, Four NYU students posted a project on kickstarter claiming to build an open source facebook. (This was around the time when there was a lot of anti-facebook sentiment floating around in the press with regard to user privacy and how facebook handles it. These students wanted to raise $10000 for their project but with the help of media PR raised $20000 from 6500 backers. Note that these were pure donations with no strings attached (http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/02/diaspora-project/). Talk about luck or right action at the right time or whatever - the diaspora guys have it. They were then invited to San Fransisco by Pivotal Labs (who provided free office space to them).
Can this be called "right action at the right time"? Because the diaspora founders proposed this idea and started fundraising at the right moment, when there was an anti-facebook sentiment floating around!!!
Of course, one may call this pure luck or what media PR can do for any idea...
Today the diaspora team has released the code for the first open source version of their social network. They plan to launch the alpha version of the social network in october. You can learn more about Diaspora's philosophy and how they plan to be different from facebook from http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/04/27/kickstarter-pitch.html
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