competition to facebook from upstarts who hold privacy as a core value #mdfp

Great news article from the BBC

Facebook has downplayed the significance of a company-wide meeting to discuss privacy issues.

As people choose to delete their profile, awareness grows that giving up you privacy is a trade, and that trade is not always fair.

In response

Diaspora Here are four talented young programmers from NYU’s Courant Institute trying to raise money so we can spend the summer building Diaspora; an open source personal web server that will put individuals in control of their data.

OneSocialWeb The purpose of onesocialweb is to enable free, open, and decentralized social applications on the web.

Elgg  It provides the components you need to build a fully-featured social environment:

Appleseed   The Appleseed Project is an effort to create open source Social Networking software that is based on a distributed model. For instance, a profile on one Appleseed website could "friend" a profile on another Appleseed website, and the two profiles could interact with each other.