Facebook has recently come into a lot of criticism for the confusing privacy settings and lack of security. A group of American students have since developed an open alternative to Facebook which will be launched around mid September 2010. This is clearly a result of them jumping on the bandwagon of Facebook’s bad publicity throughout the past couple of months.
The group of students responsible for the project consists of three computer scientists and one mathematician from New York. Their new system Diaspora has been described as a “privacy-aware, personally-controlled” social network which is to be open sourced from 15/09/2010.
The students were able to raise $200,642 from approximately 6500 people to help fund their project. It has also been said that the founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg has also contributed to the donations.
Face books popularity has increased significantly since its launch in 2006. And Facebook is currently valued at an estimated $33bn and with 500 million users it is difficult to believe that this new system will be able to compete. Face books popularity has increased significantly since its launch in 2006.
As the initial launch is to be open sourced the team have said that they will make their underlying code available for anyone at all to view and amend. So the question here is that how many other projects will stem from this and is Facebook now going to have to battle to keep their place at the top?
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Google’s new Priority Inbox
Google has launched a ‘priority inbox’ feature for Gmail aimed at helping people manage their email more effectively by identifying what is important and separating them out.
This new service has been developed using a complex set of algorithms that analyses the email behaviour of the users and in turn automatically grades the emails depending on their importance. This will allow users to focus on what is important rather than having to sift through unimportant and spam emails.
The algorithm determines the importance of the email by looking at a number of factors such as which emails the user reads and replies to, the number of other people copied in to message and also by the content of an email. Google does already ‘scan’ emails to try and identify and filter out spam.
The messages will be separated in to three categories, with the important and unread being prioritised at the top of the inbox, followed by “starred” emails that users have marked to action or for reference, and then all other emails will appear underneath these.
Doug Aberdeen, Senior Software Engineer at Google wrote on the company’s blog “Priority inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules,”
“Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail in to the ‘spam’ folder, but today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important.”
The new priority inbox feature is optional and will be rolled out to all Gmail and Google Apps accounts over the coming weeks.
