Diaspora co-founder dies at 22

Diaspora co-founder dies at 22, Diaspora facebook alternative- Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of four co-founders of the Diaspora social network, has died at the far-too-young age of 22, reports TechCrunch. The details of Zhitomirskiy’s death have not yet been made public.


UPDATE: According to CNN, the San Francisco Police Department believes Zhitomirskiy committed suicide, though that is awaiting confirmation from the medical examiner’s office.

“In this case it appears to be a suicide,” said SFPD officer Alva Esparza. “However, the medical examiner’s office will make the final decision” based on their tests.

Diaspora, which is currently in alpha testing mode and unavailable to those without an invite, is the brainchild of four New York University students: Zhitomirskiy, Maxwell Salzberg, Daniel Grippi, and Raphael Sofaer. A kind of anti-Facebook, Diaspora allows users to create profiles with or without their real name. (Facebook requires the use of real names, as does Google+, though Google has vowed to change this stipulation.)

In addition, Diaspora is decentralized, which means that you connect to one set of servers that operate independently from the other Diaspora servers, rather than connecting to a central hub of servers, as is the case with other social networks. And all user profiles are automatically set to private, and can be made more public if a user so chooses.

Read moer: http://news.yahoo.com/diaspora-co-founder-ilya-zhitomirskiy-dies-22-135014490.html