Diaspora and The Mine! Project

While social network providers have been mining our data (this is mine and that is mine) we users grew used to and suffer from a dispersed and fractured identity. We share bits and pieces mostly on the provider's terms, we have only an illusion of control what we share with whom and how to stop it when needed. Very little control online about the identity we actually own. I feel our relationships endangered when any corporatist provider can decide to cut someone off for an alleged violation of their TOS and we do not even have the right to be heard on the case (happened to others on farcebook).

So, today I am very happy to share these, in chronological order (oldest on top).

@ks12 RT @notthisbody: Diaspora - private, personal, do-it-all distributed open source #socnet http://bit.ly/c9T7U3 cc: @wecallkarma #junto

Reading about People Equity, wondering how this works out in open source http://j.mp/a62RCr #junto 

Only 30% left to fund #Diaspora! Come on, help the internet, kck.st/9QC2zk (via @brokep @moccacino) alt http://joindiaspora.com/ #junto

Upon closer reading, found on their Join Diaspora blog  a link to

the mine project

When you want to make a private picture or note available only to your friends, why do you hand it over to a multi-national corporation first? Danny O’Brien.

The Mine! project is about equipping people with tools and functionality that will help them: take charge of their data (content, relationships, transactions, knowledge), arrange (analyse, manipulate, combine, mash-up) it according to their needs and preferences and share it on their own terms whilst connected and networked on the web. The Mine! aims to be an (infra)structure for other solutions – VRM (relationships with individuals and vendors, transactions), self-defined identity, authentication, data portability and hopefully many more.

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From the design principles (yes it is emergent): 

Interoperable & compatible 

External plug-ins, applications, modules are added to the Mine! to perform the functions that user needs/wants, these can be developed by anyone 

Flexible 

Challenge is to create a ‘personal platform’ that is flexible enough to accommodate other applications – APIs etc and secure enough to keep my data private 

Independent 

Not locked into a particular platform or a silo (e.g. eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Amazon), closer to blogging (WordPress), feed readers (OPML) etc

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