• Business Insider, Friday, July 2, 2010 1:54 PM

Picking on a crew of quixotic college kids, Business Insider asks why their would-be Facebook-killer even exists. No doubt, their privacy-centric social network, dubbed Diaspora, rode a wave of bad press that tarred Facebook as a power-hungry, privacy-invading monster.

In May, a New York Times profile linked Diaspora's efforts to a growing collective resentment against Facebook "for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it." But, now that the most recent Facebook backlash seems to have blown over, Business Insider is telling Diaspora's young founders to kindly move along. "Everyone did their best to deemphasize the details while the funds [$200,000 in total] were flowing in, but Diaspora is not just another Facebook, but with better privacy controls," it assures. "Instead, the team wants to provide software for people to seed their social networking profiles themselves, and protocols for sharing them with others. There would be no centralized server that had control of your personal data." In a word, Business Insider calls the notion that average users would ever do anything like that, "insane."

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