Diaspora, the distributed social network created by four students at NYU who would take on Facebook, has been quiet for at least six months after a deluge of media exposure following its wildly successful Kickstarter campaign. The company moved out to San Francisco, where the engineers have been laboring under the wing of Pivotal Labs. Lately, though, the team has been pushing updates to Twitter as well as Github. "Did u sign up for waitlist? If so, your beta invite will be there soon, if it isn't already," @joindiaspora tweeted today. The company has teased an Android client and an open API, coming soon, and it's sending out beta invites now after almost a year of calling itself alpha.

Diaspora has also used its Twitter feed to dis Google+, which with the usability of Facbeook but claims to more privacy is arguably a Diaspora killer. "U mean G+ looks like us? we launched 1st ;)" the team responded to a user. The main feature of Google+, Circles, is very similar to Diaspora's Aspects.

Diaspora has also been linking to stories like "Google+'s Unnecessary Drama: The UI problems of a startup + the service loss of a vital public utility." Maybe time for another Kickstarter, this one for an online privacy education campaign.