Taking Control of Your Social Networking

I’ve written before about the growing concerns of letting other companies have access to and control over your data, let alone the security problems it can entail.  So reading the piece from the NY Times about diaspora* rung a few bells.  I’m not a social networker, too much like hard work, but I like to see that some people have started an alternative to handing over your data to the growing behemoths of the data age, like Facebook and Google, who are starting to look a little shady.  If you’d like to learn more and if you’d like to donate to the project you can do that here, but they’ve raised their (tiny) development fund and are working on the software that will be released free, open source and extensible and open (except when sharing your data, when it’ll be encrypted).  Roll on geek power.