Diaspora co-founder dead at 22

Image via CrunchBase

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/11/14/founder-open-source-facebook-foe-dies-at-22/

 

The team struggled with money as it worked to  release its website, despite quickly raising $200,000 in funding through venture  capitalists and microfinance startup Kickstarter after being featured in The New  York Times.

But a blog post from the company on Oct. 12 begged  followers for more money; the company argued that PayPal had been “mysteriously  and arbitrarily” freezing donations to the site. PayPal reportedly liberated the  funds.

The site’s founders described Diaspora as a  “distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other  directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy.” Last year, they  released the first version of the site to a limited audience.

The team’s efforts even got the attention of  Facebook founder Mark  Zuckerberg, who donated money to the project. “I think it is cool people are  trying to do it,” he told Wired. “I see a little of myself in them. It’s just  their approach that the world could be better and saying, ‘We should try to do  it’.”

 

Related articles

• Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Dies At 21 (huffingtonpost.com)
• Co-founder of social network Diaspora dies (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

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