Diaspora, a new open-source social network, is addressing these issues. Conceived in the summer of 2010 and developed by a group of four New York University students — Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, and Raphael Sofaer — it’s self-deemed as “Diaspora: the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.” It is designed to give the control of personal information to the individual users without the subjection of third-party sell out or privacy policy adjustment. Disapora allows people to do similar activities as Facebook — uploading photos and videos, posting comments, searching for friends.

Screenshot of the main page

In early 2010, the group of four entrepreneurs publicly requested financial support via the online fundraising platform Kickstarter with an initial goal of raising $10,000 by early June in order to start programming. In less than 2 weeks of posting the request, they raised over $100,000. By mid-May, they had 4,800 backers and a total pledge of $175,000, with figures continually growing. The group worked throughout the summer on developing the alpha version.

In mid-September, the group released the source code for developers and more recently began giving out invites for alpha-version use.

It’s still a bit early to really determine whether or not Diaspora will gain enough users to make it a true Facebook rival and rise as a top social networking website. It has exhibited tremendous support, as many people — much to the chagrin of Zuckerberg — actually value their privacy. Of course, though, the uproar about Facebook’s lack of regard for personal privacy could easily blow over; people may not be happy but people may also not care enough or be too lazy enough to switch over. This is perhaps Diaspora’s biggest challenge and will truly impact whether or not the new network will garner a large enough population for its membership.

However, as the web continues to rapidly evolve and privacy concerns continue to be a major issue for online users, and if Diaspora continues to maintain its pledge to protect the personal information that people value, then it just might have a fighting chance against the behemoth Facebook.

Below is a walk-through in pictures fromhttp://zdnet.com:

The first page you’ll see in setting up — very basic, just inputting information.

You can create “aspects” (or categories) and add your friends and acquaintances to them.

Start the conversation — equivalent to your wall (status updates, uploads, comments, etc.)

Photo upload — I agree with the comment that Diaspora is aesthetically pleasing.

This is what your home page may look like — posts from friends and information sharing.

(More pictures can be seen on Lifehacker.com as well.)

This past month or so has been a big month for platform launches (MakeSense, Jumo, CauseVox, etc) and trying to peruse them all has left me limited time in exploring Diaspora. But so far, it seems pretty navigable, with a clean and easy-to-use feel. There are small dissatisfactions here and there but that’s to be expected of any alpha version. It’ll be interesting to see what lies ahead for this new venture.

You can follow development progress and news updates on http://www.joindiaspora.com.

PS – If anyone would like an invite, just hit me up.

Founded on August 24^th, 2009, M.A.L.I[i] is a group of thirteen Moroccan citizens who present themselves as staunch advocates of individual and civil liberties aiming at fostering the debate on Individual liberties and civil rights in Morocco.

“We all love our country and that’s why we want it to improve in the field of individual liberties”, explains M.A.L.I Co-Founder Betty Lachgar.

The ambitions of M.A.L.Is go beyond words. In fact, M.A.L.I members are rather seeking to organize coup-de-poing happenings to destabilize the country’s most sacred conservatisms and then start the debate.

“ In this respect, we have decided to start a struggle against intolerance, power abuse, socio-religious inquisition and abusive laws” adds Psychoterapist Betty Lachgar.

And that is exactly what they did.

Aware that Islam is the most volcanic taboo in Morocco’s society, M.A.L.Is did not choose provocation deliberately.  What they were bent on doing was to act as the mirror of “the provocative contradictions of Morocco’s social, religious and institutional fabric.”

“We wanted to perform a symbolic act to point out the very contradictions of Morocco’s institutional backdrop. In fact, while Morocco’s constitution guarantees freedom of Worship, article 222 of Morocco’s criminal code still condemns anybody presumably of Muslim belief to a six-month sentence to jail” argues Co-Founder Zineb El Rhazoui, 27.

The Butterfly Effect

At first glance, M.A.L.I appears as one of the million movements locally struggling for the advancement and improvement of individual liberties. So far, so good. Nothing new under the sun.

However, absent social networks, what happened in Morocco on September 13^th, 2009 could have gone totally unnoticed. And that’s what makes M.A.L.I so revolutionary.

The idea is quite simple to understand. Aware that their low weight and high powerlessness as a 13-member group is a disheartening liability, M.A.L.Is have mostly relied on Facebook as a stepping stone to spread over their ideas.

How Could a 13-people picnic in the small city of Mohammedia, Morocco set off a tornado in the highest ranks of Morocco’s authorities, hit the headlines of  Le Monde and El Mundo, and arouse the ire of Human Rights Watch?

At The Beginning Was Facebook.

The conception, description and pubilicity of the un-fasting happening all started on M.A.L.I’s Facebook page.

What first started as a mild and cordial discussion about religion and society evolved to a more and more tensed, aggressive and sometimes violent exchange between those who supported the initiative and those who condemned it with the utmost vehemence.

Choosing to compare the insignificance of the incident itself with the huge consequences it had and still has as the yardstick by which the success of the operation should be assessed, one would doubtlessly call it a success. Let’s have a look.

The Media

On the local level, the story hit the headlines of all daily and weekly news magazines such as Tel Quel: “They Did It!”

On the international level, Spanish Newspaper EL Mundo’s headline best encapsulated the discrepancy between the incident and its irrational consequences: “In Morocco, 100 Policemen against 10 Sandwiches”.

NGOs

“We should not, in the name of our Muslim heritage, accept that people be condemned only because they express a different opinion” argues Khadija Rouissi, President of Bayt Al Hikma, one of the local NGOs which supported M.A.L.I’s intiative.

“They started the debate, and that’s very positive” adds AMDH President Khadija Ryadi.

On the international level, on September 19^th, Human Rights Watch called on the Moroccan authorities to cancel any charge against M.A.L.I members. A camouflet for a country that has always been boasting about being one of the most advanced democratic Muslim country in the world.

The Internet: Facebook as a facade and forums as ramifications

Facebook has been essential for M.A.L.I.  They were three important phases.

First, the creation of a Facebook group of 13 admins, a couple of clicks, some pictures, a description of the group, and the weapon was ready.

The second phase was impulsed by the creation of an event, the “symbolic picnic”, which made the group grow from 13 people to 200 ones, a sufficient critical mass to spark a small buzz prior to the event.

The third phase is still going on and it is about how the Facebook page beneficiated from the incident post-euphoria. The two groups now have more than 2,500 members. Though this number is incomparable to what we generally witness with NGOs in Western countries, it is still a lot for a country where Internet accessibility, literacy and fear of retaliation are still serious issues.

As for forums[ii], they have been playing a satellite and shelter role. Among them, Bladi has been the most active one.

Recently, In July 2010, the famous American blog Freethought devoted a 2,000-word piece on the story and its consequences.

Speaking in absolute terms, the fact that 13 people stubbornly decided to eat publicly during Ramadan 2009 in Morocco should have remained an insignificant and marginal incident. Yet, owing to the very special modus operandi chosen by the “dissident” movement to make their act go viral and start an unprecedented media buzz going beyong the borders of Morocco, what happened that day should be given the utmost attention and be construed as a major and fundamental change in the way religion and society dynamics are and will be apprehended in Morocco.

Now the Pandora box is open and there’s nothing to do to reverse the tide.

[ii] Forums perfectly illustrate Professors Keck and Sikkink’ arguments (Activist Beyond Borders, 1998)about the power of transnational networks metaphorized by the « boomerang effect »: the idea that a local group can « send » a boomerang (ask for help through the internet for example) to a group acting abroad and have the later inform and put pressure on its own local environment which, the authors believe, will in turn help the foreign group that asked for help in the first place (they « send back » the boomerang).

Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, has recently committed to donating $1 million to public schools through the online charity DonorsChoose.org.  Bing gives users two options.  They can simply click to donate $1 to any school Bing chooses.  However, if users set their homepage to Bing, they get a voucher they can use to donate $5 to the school of their choosing through DonorsChoose.org.

Wal-Mart’s crowdsourced giving strategy is somewhat different.  The company plans to donate $1.5 million to the communities who receive the highest number of votes (in the form of “Likes” on Facebook) on the Wal-Mart Fighting Hunger Together website.  The community that receives the most votes will get $1 million while the next five runners up will each receive $100,000.

Both campaigns certainly raise brand visibility but give consumers different types of influence over giving.  When someone sets Bing as his or her home page, he or she chooses a specific school to donate to and knows that school is going to get $5.  When someone votes for his or her community on Wal-Mart’s site, there is a high likelihood the community will get no money.  However, the $1 million one community gets from Wal-Mart has the potential to do more good that $5 will do for one school.

So which is better?  You decide!

What is the danger of a single story?

Chimamanda Adichie explains it well. When she started to write, Adichie explains that, though she was living in Nigeria, a country that she had never left at that time- all her characters were blonde and blue-eyed people who would eat apples, drink ginger beer and always talk about the weather. While Nigerians would rather eat mangoes than apples, drink water than Ginger Beer and never be amazed at the sun coming out, Adichie explains that she couldn’t imagine writing about anything else that the very context which composed all the literature that made her want to be a writer. And that literature was purely white-dominated.

Now, Can we extrapolate Chimamanda Adichie’s idea to new digital social networks ?

I believe so. Let’s take the example of Facebook. Is facebook dangerously promoting a “single story”?

When one signs up for a new account, one is requested to fill some elementary boxes which-it is assumed- is the best way to introduce oneself to the world: first name, last name, pictures, friends, hobbies, interests, education, marital status, religious beliefs etc.

It is true that you can choose not to show all of this information, but what is very intriguing is to notice that there is no other way to introduce yourself to the rest of the world. Therefore, it can be argued that people who are not used to this way of presenting themselves are discriminated against.

Ask children in rural Kenya working with their parents in community fields what their hobbies are, I’m not sure you’d get answers such as “photo”, “horse-riding”,”bird watching”.

Ask people from Atlas mountains in Morocco to talk about their education or say a few words about the marital status. What answers would you get, if you ever get them, let alone in English?

In many cultures, it is obscene, taboo or at least unusual to ask these kind of things.

Therefore, it seems that new digitals social platforms are mostly targeting urban people from urban megalopolises while claiming their goals is to reach out to everybody throughout the world.

While they say they want to narrow the world’s digital divide by providing a one-size-fits-all platform allowing anyone, on equal footage, to enjoy equality of numeric opportunities, it seems that those platforms are rather widening the gap between those living in the world’s most important urban centers who can now better interact socially through the use of such platforms and those who just still cannot.

I woke up yesterday to an email in my inbox reminding me of MySpace’s most recent attempt of revival: a merge with Facebook. Or rather, the creatively dubbed “Mashup with Facebook.”

On the verge of joining the hall of forgotten sites (Yahoo GeoCities, anyone?), the former social networking site that gave everyone the illusion that they had at least one friend (thanks, Tom) is now allowing users to log into their Facebook accounts through their MySpace pages. This then imports their likes and interests listed on their Zuckerberg-developed profiles to their Tom-lovin’ Spaces, allowing them to access a stream of entertainment content and other recommendations based on those likes and interests.

According to the press release:

“We are thrilled to further our collaboration with Facebook through Mashup with Facebook. This new feature is a great illustration of our strategy around social entertainment and enabling the real-time stream. The stream is one of our most popular features on Myspace, and it is now delivering an even richer entertainment experience of relevant content for our users to enjoy,” said Mike Jones, CEO of Myspace. “I’m particularly excited because so many people will be able to have the immediate satisfaction of enjoying their own entertainment program that they have customized themselves as well as connecting to all their passions and to the Myspace community at large.”

“Sharing entertainment and music interests is part of many of our friendships, online and off,” said Dan Rose, VP of Partnerships and Platform Marketing, Facebook. “Myspace is giving people an easy way to bring their favorite bands, celebrities and movies from Facebook to create a personalized experience on Myspace from the start.”

About Mashup with Facebook

Mashup with Facebook is an opt-in feature that is quick and easy to set up. Users can visit Myspace.com and click on the Mashup with Facebook button to begin. In just a few simple steps, a basic Myspace profile is created and users can immediately begin building their personal profile based on information they’ve listed in their Facebook profile. Built into the feature are robust algorithms that help enable the discovery, expression, and connection to entertainment content for a user to customize their Myspace profile. Specifically:
Facebook “likes” and “interests” are matched to relevant Myspace topic pages, profiles, video programming and other content in entertainment categories such as, music, celebrities, TV, and movies
Tailored recommendations of new topic pages and profiles are surfaced in real-time to enable discovery of new entertainment experiences and greater customization
Subscriptions to a broad array of entertainment programming, including originals, exclusives and content from around the Web are automatically enabled based on personal preferences and settings
Passionate fans within the Myspace community are connected through “friending” and “following” features of Myspace topic pages and profiles
Mashup with Facebook builds upon Sync with Facebook, a recently introduced popular feature that enables the syncing of a Myspace status update with a Facebook profile or Page. In just one month, Facebook Sync has reached over one million Myspace users and growing.

Mashup with Facebook is available now to Myspace users globally. Myspace will also soon be implementing the Facebook Like button across the site to give users an easy way to share their entertainment interests with their friends on Facebook.

[via]
MySpace is no longer declaring Facebook as a rival but rather relinquishing the title of a social network and taking on the position of a social entertainment hub. I imagine it to be somewhat like a VH1 or MTV for Web 2.0 users (but even that makes it sound more fun that it probably really is). But will these newly combined forces really save the dying website? After all, there are already many other websites that offer endless video, music, and game entertainment and that are actually used by people. As of earlier this year, MySpace lost half it’s users in just a year’s span. Why would people return to something that has been deaded in their social spheres?

Who knows, maybe the intended positive effect of the super awesome logo change will finally kick in. At the very least, seeing what new ideas MySpace attempts is somewhat entertaining, right? We can learn some best practices along the way (or rather, practices to avoid).

See below for a video tutorial of how to the Mashup works.

Mashup your Facebook Likes on Myspace

Myspace | Myspace Video

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has been experiencing a drastic spike in draft dodgers: up 26% in 2007 from only 12.1% in 1980, according to a Haifa University study. And the military predicts this figure will increase to 60% by 2020.

Why are people dodging the service?

Many believe it’s the growing number of ultra-Orthodox Israelis, who are required to sign a declaration stating they neither travel on the Sabbath nor eat non-kosher food in order to receive exemption from military service. Today, an estimated 35% of Jewish women in Israel don’t do their duty due to religious reasons.

But the IDF isn’t convinced all draft dodgers are telling the truth. So it recently turned to Facebook for some answers.

IDF officials sent fake party invitations for events taking place on Friday night to people under investigation. Since orthodox women are expected to observe the Sabbath, recipients who marked their replies as “Attending” or “Might be Attending” were called in to questioning. Investigators also caught one woman who had posted a photo of herself on Facebook holding a menu from a non-kosher restaurant.

Busted.

According to the IDF, 1,000 women were caught lying about their religious backgrounds in order to avoid military service. No legal charges were brought against any of them, though all were brought back to duty.

Interestingly, the IDF’s official magazine, BaMahachne, reports that an investigative division within Military Intelligence’s Department of Information Security actively searches through Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social networking sites for data mining.

The page is good news for fans wishing to follow the royal family without having to open a new tab. However, those looking forward to becoming online friends with her majesty will be greatly disappointed.

Although Facebook is a tool for online interaction, the royal family doesn’t seem to have any intentions of interacting. Posts on the site are limited to official photos and press releases and since the page is a fan site and not a personal profile, actions such as poking and sending messages are not possible.

Further, negative comments about the royal family are removed.

According to Buckingham Palace, the move is part of an “ongoing strategy to adopt social networking as a way of engaging people with what the Royal Family is doing.”

Nevertheless, it’s hard to see how a fan page qualifies as “adopting social networking.” Rather it seems that the monarchy is using Facebook to broadcast messages, a purpose for which YouTube and the official royal family Web site are already being used.

The British royal family is not the first to try to circumvent the principles of openness and dialogue in social media. The Danish royal house found itself in a domestic outrage last year when a YouTube video of Crown Prince Frederik, advocating the Raise Your Voice climate campaign, had the comment function disabled.

Although the video was made by the Danish Foreign Ministry and not the royal house, the case exemplifies that social media – with its ideal of symmetrical two-way communication – isn’t necessarily a place for royals.

Photo by Prachatai

Last week, Chinese authorities arrested Cheng Jianping (online alias of Wang Yi) and sentenced her to a year-long labor camp for “disturbing social order” — or more specifically, for retweeting a satirical message about attacking Japan’s pavilion at the Shanghai Expo.

The original message that Cheng reposted was from her fiance, joking about recent protests in China in which some Chinese smashed Japanese goods. Her fiance wrote, “Anti-Japanese demonstrations, smashing Japanese products, that was all done years ago … It’s not a new trick. If you really wanted to kick it up a notch, you’d immediately fly to Shanghai to smash the Japanese Expo pavilion.”

Cheng retweeted the above, adding to it, “Angry youth, charge!”

According to statements from Amnesty International to Reuters, her tweet was retweeted by only three people. The group also stated that she may be “the first Chinese citizen to become a prisoner of conscience on the basis of a single tweet.”

The director for the Asia-Pacific within Amnesty, Sam Zarifi, added, “Sentencing someone to a year in a labour camp, without trial, for simply repeating another person’s clearly satirical observation on Twitter demonstrates the level of China’s repression of online expression.”

Though Cheng may be the first arrest on the basis of a single satirical tweet, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen China crack down the whip on the use of social networks and media. The most popular example may be that of recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, jailed for his low-level activism and use of media to speak up against the Chinese government.

Just a few days ago, the organizers of the Chinese Blogger Conference — started in 2005 — were forced to cancel the annual event due to pressure from authorities. The venue was announced just four days before the two-day conference, but the venue’s owners reneged the location’s use for the conference after being pressured by authorities.

Blogs, social networks, and other mediums used for information sharing have been harshly regulated in China. There are few avenues by which users can still voice themselves to some extent. A Twitter microblogging equivalent, Weibo, was launched in China after the Twitter ban but posts are closely monitored by Chinese government. Again, programs and companies like Tweetdeck also allow for a backdoor entry way to reach the banned mediums. The Amazon Kindle seems to be popular as well, as the e-book technology gives people a way to connect to Facebook.

It’s interesting to see how social media and networking will continue to unfold and develop — or not — in China.

So the Scandinavian company Rambøll, which specializes in engineering consultancy, has discovered. Inspired by Facebook, the company has created the online platform Ramlink to let employees share knowledge across subsidiaries. So reports the online technology magazine Version2.

With 9,000 employees in more than 20 countries the platform makes up a central knowledge base, through which employees can easily tap into the expertise of their colleagues and thus gain the insights necessary to complete a task.

“On the intranet every department had its own site, which made it hard to access information across the organization. As a result, Rambøll started looking in to new ways to promote internal knowledge sharing,” the magazine writes.

A big challenge in the organization was to reach people with just the right competence for a project so the system was designed to revolve around the employees, giving them each a profile to fill out and update on a regular basis – just like on Facebook.

Apart from sharing ideas, employees can use the site to find out what their colleagues are working on and, through Facebook-like status updates, search for assistance on projects.  In addition, the platform functions as a personal marketing platform where employees can promote themselves in order to be assigned a project.

With Ramlink Rambøll has brought the intranet into the social age. It shall be interesting to see how many Danish companies will realize that the traditional intranet has done its duty and follow suit.

Web Director Kate Sands Adams considers the IRC online strategies surrounding the earthquake in Haiti last winter to be among its biggest successes.  The IRC was able to raise an extraordinary amount of money in a short time as well as contribute to increased media coverage of the disaster.

Furthermore, the IRC raised $10,000 on the Facebook Causes application.  This is especially impressive because, according to the Washington Post, fewer than 50 of the approximately 179,000 groups using Causes have been able to raise this amount. The organization also has frequent smaller scale success like when New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof retweeted an IRC tweet, which exponentially expanded the tweet’s reach.

Do not be fooled into thinking these successes are due to luck or public concern during disasters alone.  The IRC’s successful fundraising and advocacy are the result of strategic planning and careful analysis of past online trends.

According to Adams, the organization used to keep a relatively low profile in all aspects of its work.  However, in 2006, the IRC underwent a major rebranding campaign to raise its visibility.  Adams says that external communications have been ramping up ever since and the web has become especially important as a marketing tool to reach new audiences.  Although the IRC has a solid core of long-term supporters, the organization knows the importance of reaching new people.

Ruth Fertig, Online Community Builder at the IRC, adds that cultivating new audiences is a primary goal of the social media strategy as well.  The IRC hopes to turn people who follow the organization on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube into activists, donors, volunteers and sometimes even employees.

Another important goal is to raise unrestricted funds, which the organization can allocate wherever they are most needed.  According to Adams, this type of funding is crucial for sustaining the IRC’s ongoing work as well as responding quickly and effectively during emergencies.

In order to achieve its goals, the IRC has made a priority of tracking its successes. In evaluating advocacy campaigns, the IRC looks at how different types of content drive users to sign petitions or write to leaders.  In terms of fundraising, the IRC monitors criteria like the number of individual online donors, donation amounts and repeat donations.  On the social media platforms, a successful post or tweet is one that many users share or one that sparks conversation via comments or wall posts on Facebook.  Here, a challenge is to pinpoint exactly what it is about a particular post or tweet that makes it go viral.

As a result of tracking trends, Adams, Fertig and the other members of the web team at the IRC have amassed a collection of best practices for engaging potential activists and donors.  Fertig emphasized that forming best practices is key.  It saves her time and allows her to do her job better

Adams has found an important practice is to react quickly to website analytics data. During their efforts surrounding the earthquake in Haiti, the IRC found that it was extremely effective to rapidly post new content, photos and video from the ground.  It allowed them to communicate the urgency of the situation and inspire people to help.

The IRC has found that maximizing use of multimedia in general is very effective.  Analysis of IRC website traffic shows that most people tend to click on pictures and video and will stay on a page longer if it utilizes multimedia.

Another lesson is to listen to users and let their needs drive content.  Fertig describes social media platforms as “places for a two way conversation.”  As the IRC’s Online Community Builder, she spends a large portion of her time listening to and monitoring what the IRC’s online community is saying in addition to putting out their own content. She adds that asking questions on social media platforms is a great way to engage people and spark conversations.

Fertig also reaches out to bloggers and generally encourages others to be the IRC’s “megaphone.”  She has found that messages are more effective in the community if “they take the cause upon themselves.”  In response to the many requests for support they receive from individuals hoping to hold awareness or fundraising events, the IRC recently launched iRESCUE.  This “Do-It-Yourself Fundraising” site gives people the resources they need to spread the word to family and friends.

Similarly, through its research, the IRC has found that people are moved by individual stories as well as what is happening on the ground.  The IRC’s Blog, Voices from the Field, was created to give the IRC’s field staff a place to write about their experiences and share their pictures and videos.  Adams says that it is the place where her colleagues in the field “take center stage.”

However, because staff in the field are busy with a variety of lifesaving tasks, they have less capacity to contribute content, photos or video to the blog.  To address the challenge, the team now has four information officers around the world who work closely with field staff and the external communications team to share that important perspective from the ground.

In addition to listening to their audience, Adams finds it important for the IRC to “talk to them in a language they understand.”  Although most of the IRC online community is well informed about a variety of issues, web content producers must use everyday vocabulary and refrain from being overly technical.

The IRC’s web strategy can set an example for other international nonprofits seeking to enter the Web 2.0 world.  Learning from best practices and listening to target audiences can help a small team reach big goals.