Will Diaspora Be a Safer Alternative Than FaceBook?

FaceBook has over 500 million users to date. The previous popular social networking site, MySpace has lost a lot of users because of FaceBook. There is, however, a problem with FaceBook privacy. There have been many issues raised over how safe FaceBook is. FaceBook tends to add things without the knowledge of users that could potentially put them at risk. One such instance is allowing users phone numbers to appear in the phones of their contacts without asking permission to do it. There is a new social networking site that will be launched in September 2010. This site will allow you to download an application to your computer to give you more control over everything that you do.

The new social networking site is called Diaspora and it was created by four college students. They are so confident that it will work that two of the students have decided not to return to school. The creators of Diaspora say that the network will be much safer than that of FaceBook. It will be interesting to see how well Diaspora will do against FaceBook considering the popularity of the site and the many benefits that members seem to enjoy.

Once you download the software for Diaspora, you run it like your own website, or at least that is the understanding of how the site works. That is why it gives you all the control when it comes to safety issues. FaceBook is notorious for adding applications that have a great potential to take away all the user's privacy. FaceBook recently launched the FaceBook Places application without really forewarning users that it would automatically put them in the loop. Many users were not happy about this decision and felt that the application should have been a choice to join rather than having to go into the privacy settings to get rid of it. These types of actions by FaceBook would make you wonder why people even use the site at all. It is more than likely because all of their friends are there and it is a good way to promote business as well.

Diaspora might be just the thing to get people off FaceBook and onto a more secure type of social networking. Although the site will have basically the same things as other social networking sites, it is the only one that allows you to host your own social networking site from your own computer rather than worrying about things being added that you don't want there. Safety should always be a key issue when sites are changing things to "make it better". That hasn't been the habit of FaceBook and they need a new and more competitive site to overtake them like they overtook MySpace.