[p2p-research] Diaspora Kickstarter Fund - Securing personal information in Social Networks through Decentralization using GPG

[Kevin Flanagan]

Diaspora Kickstarter Fund - Securing personal information in Social
Networks through Decentralization

from - http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/04/21/a-little-more-about-the-project.html

Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate
computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without
surrendering our privacy. We call these computers ‘seeds’. A seed is
owned by you, hosted by you, or on a rented server. Once it has been
set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your facebook
profile, tweets, anything. We are designing an easily extendable
plugin framework for Diaspora, so that whenever newfangled content
gets invented, it will be automagically integrated into every seed.

Now that you have your information in your seed, it will connect to
every service you used to have for you. For example, your seed will
keep pulling tweets and you will still be able to see your Facebook
newsfeed. In fact, Diaspora will make those services better! Upload an
image to Flickr and your seed can automatically generate a tweet from
the caption and link. Social networking will just get better when you
have control over your data.

A seed will not just be all your existing networks put together,
though. Decentralizing lets us reconstruct our “social graphs” so that
they belong to us. Our real social lives do not have central managers,
and our virtual lives do not need them. Friend another seed and the
two of you can synchronize over a direct and secure connection instead
of through a superfluous hub. Encryption (privacy nerds: we’re using
GPG) will ensure that no matter what kind of content is being
transferred, you can share privately. Eventually, today’s hubs could
be almost entirely replaced by a decentralized network of truly
personal websites.


http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr