For those of you that don't know me, I'm not a fan of Facebook. I like to keep my personal information private and only share it with the people that are important to me. I don't want friends of friends knowing that I'm going out of town for a week, that i was born on some day of some month in 19xx, or that I have a child that goes to a certain school. Now, I'll admit that the concept of Facebook is great and the execution has been a huge success, but at the end of the day Facebook is a company looking for new ways to generate revenue, either by selling advertising space, or sharing private account information with third party companies.

Apparently I'm not the only one who feels this way. Upon browsing the vast waves of the internet, I stumbled upon a very ambitious project called Diaspora*. Their motto: "The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network."
For those wondering the meaning of diaspora: "diaspora ("a scattering or sowing of seeds") refers to any people or population who are forced or induced to leave their traditional homelands, the dispersal of such people, and the ensuing developments in their culture."

Not slated for release until September 2010, they've managed to acquire over $200,000 from over 6000 backers on kickstart and have been diligently working on the project all summer.

The initial release will include the following:

• Full-fledged communications between Seeds (Diaspora instances)
• End to end GPG
• External Service Scraping of most major services (reclaim your data)
• Version 1 of Diaspora’s API with documentation
• Public GitHub repository of all Diaspora code

It'll be decentralized, allow end to end encryption of data, pull all of your social media content back into one place, and allow members of the community to expand and build upon the core ideas of a private social network.

I'd recommend checking out their faq, blog, and media page if you're interested in learning more, and I'm hoping for a huge reception to the newest social media concept from those that are fed up with privacy issues.