• New York Times, Wednesday, May 12, 2010 2:25 PM

The New York Times profiles four college kids hammering away at an alternative to Facebook, i.e., a social network that won't "force people to surrender their privacy to a big business." Social startups are nothing new, obviously, but The Times related their efforts to a growing collective resentment against Facebook "for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it."

As the young entrepreneurs describe it, their free Diaspora* software will let users set up their own personal servers, dubbed "seeds," create their own hubs, and fully control the information they share. Bigger picture, The Times reports that that "terms of the bargain people make with social networks -- you swap personal information for convenient access to their sites -- have been shifting, with the companies that operate the networks collecting ever more information about their users." As a result, "Some younger people are becoming more cautious about what they post."

Read the whole story at New York Times »