After Facebook announced changes to its privacy settings at their f8 Conference in April the anger from the service’s users was heated. This led to some vowing to quit Facebook (an utter failure), and led a group of NYU students to create an open-source Facebook alternative, Diaspora.

According to a post on their blog, Diaspora states the following:

“Dear Internet,

Since August is nearly over, it is time for an update and answers to some questions. We have been coding. We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th.

We are spending a good chunk of time concentrating on building clear, contextual sharing. That means an intuitive way for users to decide, and not notice deciding, what content goes to their coworkers and what goes to their drinking buddies.”

I am excited to see what Diaspora looks like, how it works, and if it will succeed. The project has been much ballyhooed, and it will be hard to overtake for any social network to bring down Facebook. Facebook has over 500 million users, with Dallas, at number 8, on the list of the top 10 cities on Facebook, meaning Diaspora has a long way to go to overtake Facebook in terms of widespread use.

That said, the social experiment of the NYU students creating the project and raising the funds to do so ($200,000) through Kickstarter, is an amazing feat. Time will tell if Diaspora is a success, and one thing’s certain, the site’s battle with Facebook will be fun to watch.

Do you think Diaspora will succeed? Will you leave Facebook to use Diaspora?

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