This year, Facebook has undergone a number of problems related to privacy of its users. Faced with this, four American students devised a social network of open format, allowing its users and managers to have more control over this aspect: the Diaspora — which is in fact an interesting choice for a name.

After raising more than $ 200,000.00 — from supporters ranging from ordinary users to companies and executives, including Facebook — their creators have announced a release date for the Diaspora: September 15. The code will be open, meaning that programmers around the world can examine, modify and even lead to change. More on the initial idea on the video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Neverthless, don’t you even think that having it will turn yourself into the next zillionaire. This already happened more than once before; for instance with Digg hype people went crazy and you have at least three successful FLOSS clones: Meneame, Pligg and Drigg; just to mention only one of those efforts. Portuguese know for sure the DoMelhor (which is based on Meneame) and others may know about Free Software Daily (which is based on Drupal’s based distro Drigg).

And, besides Facebook, there are already several big contenders like MySpace and Netlog.

What makes Facebook so difficult to surpass is the same thing that makes Google search engine difficult to overrun: their massive infrastruture. That’s where the big bucks are invested and not in software development.

Another sad conclusion for us, non-Americans (inc. Canada, etc) that strive to push some FLOSS projects forward is that it is almost impossible to raise any money to invest in FLOSS outside USA and Canada — and I already experienced that in first hand with Care3G and Care2x — especially in such a crazy idea as a “Facebook” clone. And if that was not enough, without any Business Plan or other financial jiberish.

Yesterday I was viewing the Daily Show with Jon Howard and he interviewed Atul Gawande on his book [avhamazon wishlist="316GBGPB468U5" locale="UK" asin="1846683130" linktype="text" picsize="small"]. One of the most interesting things I heard was about the results of using checklists in Hospital’s ICU and in healthcare in general. Explored in detail in the book is the study sponsored by the World Health Organization to verify if checklists made any difference to death numbers in several hospitals around the world and the results seems to be astonishing.

In a nutshell, Atul Gawande proposes “checklists” as tools to deal with the limitations of human beings in the face of complex problems in stressful environments throughout a series of real world examples.

This is for sure a must buy for me, and not only with respect to Care2x/Care3G projects.

Gjergj Sheldija

I think that a blog could be a lightier way to discuss ideias on Care2x and its evolution. I hope that, with time, some other developers (Claudio Torbinio, Elpídio Latorilla, Noel Villamor, Robert Meggle and others) may wish to write there too.

I already posted there some of my ideias on UI changing, which is, in my humble opinion, one of the most important changes that Care2x requires and that, unfortunately, will require a daunting rewrite on almost all the code.