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An Open Source Anti-Facebook Social Network Is Coming

September 3, 2010 by Raj Agrawal 1 Comment

Diaspora, unlike the corporate giants like Facebook, is an Open Source social networking website project that features privacy-aware, personally controlled socializing. This means, the privacy of the user interactions will be in full control of the user themselves.

It is fair to call it an Anti-Facebook initiative. The Diaspora project has been started by New York University students with an aim to serve the online social networking consumers a much better and fully secured-privacy controlled socializing. The highly anticipated Open Source social networking website ‘Diaspora’, is set to release on Sept, 15th 2010 and has successfully gathered more than $2,00,000 funding from all over.

Interestingly, the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has also funded his share to this project. As a tradition of Open Source community, the source code of Diaspora will be made available publicly on the day it will be launched. Diaspora also plans to provide some amazing set of services viz.

OpenID
Voice-over IP
Distributed Encrypted Backups
Instant Messaging protocol
UDP integration

The interface and the exact features of Diaspora has not yet been confirmed yet but you can expect what it would probably look like,

diaspora screenshot — A preview snap of diaspora, the probable interface

It’s hard to say how well this initiative will do. The user interface and the feature set are the keys to the success of social networking business. Looking at the snap shot, the interface looks very clean and simple. Not much can be said as of now. Being Open Source, it is sure to attract a huge mass of geeky audience. Depending on how well it is implemented and depending on the feature set, Diaspora’s level of success will glow accordingly.

Wiki defines – Diaspora (In Greek: scattering of seeds) as the movement or migration of a group of people, such as those sharing a national and/or ethnic identity, away from an established or ancestral homeland.

What are your views on this? Do you think Diaspora will defeat the giants like Facebook considering it being a privacy focused social network?

Suspicious Activity On Your Gmail Account?

March 30, 2010 by Raj Agrawal 2 Comments

Gmail will now notify you, if it is in suspicion

A longtime ago Gmail had rolled out a feature that gave you the accessibility to check which IP address accessed your Gmail account when your account was last logged in (works even when your account is not using https). Now, Gmail has extended this feature by adding the country name tag to the IP address and will notify you of a suspicious activity if your Gmail account was last accessed through another location.

As mentioned on Gmail Blog: To determine when to display this message, our automated system matches the relevant IP address, logged per the Gmail privacy policy, to a broad geographical location. While we don’t have the capability to determine the specific location from which an account is accessed, a login appearing to come from one country and occurring a few hours after a login from another country may trigger an alert.

By clicking on the “Details” link next to the message, you’ll see the last account activity window that you’re used to, along with the most recent access points.

If you think your account has been compromised, you can change your password from the same window. Or, if you know it was legitimate access (e.g. you were traveling, your husband/wife who accesses the account was also traveling, etc.), you can click “Dismiss” to remove the message.

Google ISP, Offering 1 Gbps Data Transfer Speed

February 11, 2010 by Raj Agrawal 5 Comments

An experiment

Google has recently announced the trial run of it’s new project, fiber-to-home internet access at the speed of 1 Gb per second. Google is seeking information from interested municipalities in America about locations to build the network. It plans to serve around 50,000 to 5,00,000 people in it’s initial phase.

Google says:

Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better, and faster for everyone. Here are some specific things that we have in mind:

Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it’s creating new bandwidth-intensive “killer apps” and services, or other uses we can’t yet imagine.

New deployment techniques: We’ll test new ways to build fiber networks; to help inform, and support deployments elsewhere, we’ll share key lessons learned with the world.

Openness and choice: We’ll operate an “open access” network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory, and transparent way.
Even though the service will be launched in selected markets, this is a big step toward the much needed revamp of ISP market all over. It’s pretty clear that Google is preparing and making it’s first step for the future of it’s online based products and not to forget, Chrome OS which entirely based on cloud computing.