(Photo: Tech Globex)

Last night, news broke that Facebook had beta launched a new mobile ad network that allows advertisers to make bids on ads based on Facebook's trove of highly specific user data.

It's a natural move for a company that's most prized possession is its database of fleshed-out stats, collected in painstakingly detail for every person who's ever signed up for Facebook. The company knows your interests, your friends, your location, age and gender--after all, you volunteered that information for them to happily gobble up. Now, all that info is being channeled into ads for apps and websites outside the Facebook environment.

As TechCrunch explains:

Starting later today, you may start seeing banner and interstitial ads targeted by your Facebook biographical and social data within non-Facebook mobile iOS and Android apps plus mobile websites where you’ve authenticated with Facebook. The targetable data includes your age, gender, location, Likes, friends who’ve used an advertiser’s app and basically any other targeting options in Facebook’s standard ads marketplace....

Advertisers set a bid they’re willing to pay Facebook to reach a certain demographic of users. Meanwhile, Facebook syncs its anonymous user IDs with several mobile ad exchanges. When a Facebook user visits one of the apps or sites where these exchanges have placements, the exchange instantly sends Facebook that user’s ID and asks if there’s a bid set to target them. If so, Facebook pays the ad exchange some portion of the bid, and the ad is shown to the user.

Sounds simple enough. But should you be weirded out by this newest move? Let's investigate.

Yes, this whole thing is really creepy.

Though the fact that Facebook owns all user data uploaded to the platform is clearly embedded in the site's terms of service agreement, very few users actually take the time to read through such hulking documents. When you signed up for Facebook--many of us way back in 2005 when it was still just a small network for colleges--you had no idea how big the platform would grow and what that would mean for all of the data you uploaded to it.

For privacy hawks, the notion that a website would serve up your data--even if it's anonymously--to another company so that they can manipulate you into buying stuff is not exactly good news. Facebook is essentially giving brands and advertisers an easy route to needle their way into your deepest desires. And for many, that's unsettling.

The news is also important within the larger context of Facebook's story. As TechCrunch writes, "That’s why today represents an important shift from Facebook utilizing its traffic to instead solely utilizing its data to monetize." As its stock price hovers around the $20 mark, how much user data will Facebook be willing to sell to meet its bottom line?

Eh, whatever, it's not really that creepy.

If you were worried about Facebook selling your data, you probably shouldn't have given it to them in the first place. That's why Diaspora was such a big thing (for a minute there, anyway)--if you want a social network that allows you to maintain ownership of your data, Facebook isn't the right choice. Plus, what they're doing is basically the same as what Google already does by scanning your Gmail for keywords and offering up ads based on those.

No matter where you go on the web, you're going to be served ads--it's a sad fact of the modern Internet. Why not get ads tailor made for your interests? If you're a young guy who likes Dave Matthews Band and works at a startup, it makes sense that you'd get shown ads for overpriced messenger bags. Maybe you'll even buy one.

And as TechCrunch adds, "Facebook assures me privacy was “top of mind” when designing the new ads program and no personally identifiable information is ever shared with third parties."

Whatever your position on the new ad network, investors must be happy that Facebook is finally making a fresh move towards further monetization.

Mr. Salzberg (Photo: Darren McCarra via Sociable.co)

Earlier this month, Diaspora cofounder Max Salzberg told Betabeat that the team would turn away from the highly-anticipated, but daunting enterprise of building the anti-Facebook and instead devote its "main focus" towards Makr.io: a photo remixing tool that makes sharing and creating image macros more social. (All your memes are belong to friends, etc.)

It sounded an awful lot like the dreaded p-word to us, but Mr. Salzberg framed it as a natural evolution for an open source project. To that end, the team, which is working on Makr as part of Y Combinator's current class, posted a message entitled, "Announcement: Diaspora* Will Now Be A Community Project," on the company's blog today.

On the phone with Betabeat this afternoon, Mr. Salzberg compared Diaspora to Wordpress or Mozilla. "Lots of open source projects are community run," he explained, referencing two incredibly successful standouts. "Some people are like, 'Oh, you're leaving?' But that's not it at all. We can have side projects."

Devoting the majority of your time to another venture sounds like more than just a side project, but Mr. Salzberg insisted that "It's like people in bands can have multiple bands. [Diaspora is] something I did and I'm really proud of it. It's bigger than just me. We're never going to stop making cool stuff, we're not really a one trick pony."

In fact, Mr. Salzberg framed handing over the keys to Diaspora's Pivotal Tracker as a sign of the initiative's progress. "It speaks to the maturity of the project and that there are stakeholders other than the two guys who started it. Thousands of people love and use Diaspora everyday so the community needs to have some decision making power itself."

Mr. Salzberg said he wasn't sure exactly how many people were using Diaspora. "I don't actually know because there are thousands of installations around the world," he said. "People can run it and I'm not sure what they're doing to it."

Now that's it opened up to the community, he added, they can be in charge of things like feature development and launching fellowships. "This is how noncommercial open source projects work," he argued, adding that "Diaspora will probably have some foundation that's the steward of the code."

"It was never supposed to be a startup or something," said Mr. Salzberg. Despite once telling New York magazine that the attention from the early success of its Kickstarter project "almost paralyzed us,” he told Betabeat that the team was "just sort of doing something for fun."

Would a leaderless community be able to put in place the kind of governance structure an open source project needs? "I don't think we're going away, but there's never been a third seat to the community," Mr. Salzberg said.

Here's how Mr. Salzberg and his cofounder Daniel Grippi described it on the Diaspora blog (emphasis theirs):

Today, we are giving control of Diaspora to the community.

As a Free Software social project, we have an obligation to take this project further, for the good of the community that revolves around it. Putting the decisions for the project’s future in the hands of the community is one of the highest benefits of any FOSS project, and we’d like to bring this benefit to our users and developers. We still will remain as an important part this community as the founders, but we want to make sure we are including all of the people who care about Diaspora and want to see it succeed well into the future.

If you look around, you’ll see that we’ve made an effort to open up to the community more to help better serve it. We’ve opened up our Pivotal Tracker for community developers help join in (You can sign up here), we’ve launched a tool that deploys one-click installations to the Heroku app hosting service, and we’ve updated joindiaspora.com to be more community-centric, showcasing other pods a user can join.

(Photo: Makr.io)

After the tragic loss of one of its core members, the team behind Diaspora--a Y-Combinator-backed open source "anti-social network"--went underground for a while, privately grieving while attempting to keep the well-funded and highly hyped company running. But the startup show must go on: AllThingsD reported today that the Diaspora team channeled their grief into a new site--launched today and called Makr--that allows you to easily remix and distribute photos.

Makr looks a lot like a slew of different products out there, including NYC-based Can.vas and Obvious Corporation's newest platform Medium, while borrowing the notion of a "front page" populated by trending posts from Reddit. Users can upload their own images or remix already posted ones, adding pithy captions. Other users can then like, remix or comment on photos.

We caught Makr cofounder Max Salzberg in a chat on the site while browsing, and he agreed to discuss Makr with us--only after he was done making his bacon, of course.

"It’s kind of like the game Telephone that people played in kindergarten," he told Betabeat by phone. "You say one thing, but the next person hears another thing. We’re trying to think of a simple, easy way for people to be creative. You can play around with a simple quippy thing and then your friends can riff off of that."

"I think that what we’re trying to do is make memes for everybody, so it doesn’t need to be a lolcat or some sort of weird internet comment to be a meme," Mr. Salzberg added. "We think people will use Makr in schools and in workplaces. You can express some sort of emotion and other people can kind of respond in a way that's about creating something."

(We decided to leave the debate over the difference between a meme and an image macro for a later time.)

Makr's front page is dominated by images that are a little self-referential, including a bunch of remixed pictures of the Makr team itself and captions like "Makr.io: Powered by Mariah Carey & Pizza." But perhaps Makr's most powerful idea is the notion of hosting both real and virtual parties where users schedule a time to get together and remix photos. As someone who clings to our computer on Friday nights like most people do a whiskey sour, we can definitely see why that's appealing.

"Most people think technology is mediating you from the real world, but we feel like it’s giving you this opportunity to have another way to hang out with your friends," said Mr. Salzberg

As for the future of Diaspora? Turns out it doesn't really need the team to stick around and run things.

"Diaspora is more of an open-source community project; at this point there’s lots of people all over the world working on it," Mr. Salzberg said. "Makr is our main focus."

(flickr.com/andwat)

Yesterday afternoon, this reporter was scrambling to finish reporting a forward-looking story about how banks are exploring the possibility of using social media data to judge loan and credit applicants. My editor wanted a quote from a privacy advocate, so I immediately thought of Eben "Spying for Free" Moglen, a militant digital privacy advocate, founder of the uber-secure personal server FreedomBox, and the inspiration for the decentralized social network Diaspora. In hindsight, perhaps I should have just called Cory Doctorow.

Mr. Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University, was not particularly interested in talking about banks using social media to spy on their customers.

Everyone who uses Facebook, Twitter and the like shares the blame for the serious and ongoing global erosion of privacy enabled by the internet, he said. Banks aren't the problem, he said; the users tempting banks with their Twitter and Facebook postings are the problem.

As are reporters who write about privacy issues with social media without first closing their Facebook accounts.

(I call Mr. Moglen's office at the end of the day and explain what I'm working on. Mr. Moglen starts out sounding like a patronizing but ultimately kind-hearted professor. He reminds me of my patronizing but ultimately kind-hearted uncle, who works in IT. Emphasis mine)

Me: I'm looking for... like, whether this is a privacy issue?

Mr. Moglen: I don't understand what that means.

The data is a privacy issue because we have an enormous ecological disaster created by badly-designed social media now being used by people to control and exploit human beings in all sorts of ways.

That's the consequence of social media structures which encourage people to share using centralized databases, and everything they share is held by someone who is no friend of theirs who also runs the servers and collects the logs which contain all the information about who accesses what, the consequences of which is that we are creating systems of comprehensive surveillance in which a billion people are involved and those people's lives are being lived under a kind of scrutiny which no secret police service is the 20th century could ever have aspired to achieve. And all of that data is being collected and sold by people whose goal it is to make a profit selling the ability to control human beings by knowing more about themselves than they know. Okay? That's true of all this information all the time everywhere. The thing you're working on is simply one of 100,000 implications of that disaster.

Me: Right.

Mr. Moglen: Okay, so have you closed your Facebook account and stopped using Twitter?

Me: Have... I?

Mr. Moglen: Yes, you!

Me: No, I can't!

Mr. Moglen: (getting agitated) Of course you can, if you don't want to be in a situation in which you are more heavily surveilled than the KGB or Stasi or Securitate or any other secret police ever surveilled anybody (indistinguishable) and what do you mean you 'can't'? I can, how come you can't?

Me: Well, everyone else is using it.

Mr. Moglen: That's not true. And besides, if everybody else is using them then I couldn't be doing what I'm doing. I'm not using them. You're quite wrong.

Me: Right...

Moglen: Right. But you're not going to do anything about that. So you're using them and every time you tag anything or respond to anything or link to anything, you're informing on your friends. You're part of the problem, you're not part of the answer. Why are you calling up to ask me about the problem you're creating?

Me: Well, I was hoping you might be able to help me think about this particular—

Mr. Moglen: I have helped you. And you have refused to help me back. I've told you this is an ecological problem created by people doing a silly thing.

Me: I think the problem is, people have trouble understanding why, like what the real dangers are—

Mr. Moglen: But that's not the problem! You know what the problem is. The problem is, even though you know what the problem is you're continuing to make it worse.

Me: It just doesn't seem like the consequences are that bad.

Mr. Moglen: The problem isn't people who don't know! The problem is people like you who do know and go on making it worse. Right?

Me: Well I think for me personally—

Mr. Moglen: Well, now you know. So you should stop now. And not only should you stop, you should get the people around you to stop. If you get the people around you to stop, they'll get the people around them to stop and we'll fix the problem. It's like littering. Why are you calling me up to ask me about the social consequences of your littering without stopping doing it? And then when you tell me a fatuous thing like you 'can't,' it's perfectly clear that whatever you do here, it won't be civic journalism because it won't result in a better world.

Me: Uh, okay. I hear what you're saying.

Mr. Moglen: No, you don't actually. You just want to claim you hear what I'm saying.

Me: Well just for me personally right now, the utility seems to—

Mr. Moglen: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no! You see that's not true. You injure other people today also using social media. You've informed on them. You've created more records about them. You've added to the problems not of yourself but of other people. If it were as simple as just you're only hurting yourself I wouldn't bother pointing it out to you. See, that's the difference, okay? The reason that this all works is that even when you know you're hurting other people, you're too selfish to stop. And there are hundreds of millions of people like you. That's why it works.

Me: What's the damage?

Mr. Moglen: Well you called me, you know what the problem is. People lost their homes. People lose their money. People lose their freedom. (??? -ed.)

You know because you saw it, because you're following this, that Facebook now acknowledges what we said for a long time and they didnt acknowledge, that every single photograph uploaded to Facebook is put through facial recognition software they call PhotoDNA which is used to find people for whom any law enforcement agency in the world is looking. You understand? So every time you upload a photograph to Facebook or put one on Twitter for that matter you are now ratting out anybody in that frame to any police agency in the world that's looking for them. Some police agencies in the world are evil. That's a pretty serious thing you've just done. But you do it all the time. And when I asked you to stop you tell me you can't, which is an antisocial thing to say.

Me: That wasn't a totally serious answer.

Mr. Moglen: Of course it was a totally serious answer. It's the truth. You're not going to do anything about fixing this problem. You're going to claim that it's just something you're reporting and then you're going to go right back to making it worse.

And if you ever call me up again to ask me about yet another one of these things you'll still be making it worse, because although you can report the problem you can't take social responsibility for your part in causing the problem.

That's why I tell you it's like littering. You should stop doing it before you write in the newspaper that there's too much garbage on the street.

Me: Okay. Well thanks for your help. I appreciate it.

Mr. Moglen: No it wasn't helpful, it was hurtful because I told you the story you're working on is the story of your own anti-social behavior and that of people like you. It's not helpful.

What you want to know is that somewhere there's a regulator who might stop the bank. But you don't want to hear that the regulator we really need to call upon is you, yourself. Right? You don't want to write that in the newspaper. I guarantee you whatever story you file will treat this as a problem caused by everyone except the readers at The Observer and that will be false. The problem is caused by people who would like a little help spying on their friends. And in a genteel way, that's what the social media offers. They get to surveil other people. In return for a little bit of the product, they assist the growth of these immense commercial spying operations. The commercial spying operations are used to empower people who have lots to get more from people who have less. They lead to a more unequal society. More unequal in economic terms and more unequal in political terms. The users, as with most stuff that's dangerous that's sold to people, the users are the victims and even the stuff you write which purports to be critical will do everything except telling people the central fact, which is they have to stop using.

Me: I think that's totally relevant and will definitely put it in. (N.B.: In the end, I did not put this in the story for several reasons, not the least of it was the fact that it was late and over word limit.)

Mr. Moglen: Well, we'll see what gets past your editor. That much there's a test for. I can see what The Observer publishes. Now, assuming all that, and assuming you're actually going to give even an instant's consideration to your own part in creating this ecological nightmare, what else do you want to know?

(At this point, Mr. Moglen seemed genuinely amenable to answering my questions. However, this reporter was a little shook, to be honest.)

Me: Honestly, that's good. That covers it.

Mr. Moglen: Take care.

Me: Thanks a lot.

That leaves three cofounders: Daniel Grippi and Maxwell Salzberg, who are working on Diaspora full time, and cofounder Raphael Sofaer serving on the board with NYU professor Evan Korth. Mr. Grippi and Mr. Salzberg signed a letter of intent, effectively, with blog post today announcing Diaspora's plan to get to beta. "After long discussions with each other, people close to us, and members of the Diaspora* community, we have come up with a plan to get our beta out the door by early 2012," the foundation says.

The startup's three goals are:

1. Harness the power of the crowd in order to get priorities such as a privacy policy finalized, collaboratively with the community,
2. Hiring, and
3. Making Diaspora financially sustainable.

"A new social web model where users are not the product, but willful participants who are creating new modes of communication. This was our vision when we launched our Kickstarter campaign in April 2010, and it remains our vision today," write the cofounders of one of the most idealistic startups of our time.

CNN Money is reporting the death was a suicide according to "a source close to the company." Rumors of suicide inspired those in the startup community to speculate that the pressure of building a high-profile company that was facing struggles caused Mr. Zhitomirskiy to end his life. Diaspora recently ran out of money and had to ask donors for more and CEO Yosem Companys stepped down for personal reasons.

That speculation led to a greater discussion about the prevalence of depression among startup founders, a gig that by nature vacillates between extreme highs and lows. "The biggest risk in doing a startup is not the financial risk per se. It's the psychological risk of knowing you really, really tried—and still failed," one commenter on Hacker News wrote.

UPDATE: Official statement from Diaspora below.

The Diaspora boys.

Diaspora, the Facebook competitor brought to you by Kickstarter and radical privacy advocates lecturing at NYU, has been trucking along in the Pivotal Labs office in California. But from the outside, things don't seem to be going so well. It's been about 18 months since the company raised a monster $200,641 on Kickstarter, and Diaspora is still squeaking out invites at a snail's pace. 

CEO Yosem Companys has abruptly left the company three days ago "due to personal reasons."

And Diaspora recently asked for more money, which we learn today via The Daily goes toward "stipends of $1,000 a month for housing and $2,000 a month for living expenses."

Wait a second--$3,000 a month? In the days of extreme lean startupdom, that sounds pretty cushy.

One Betabeat writer suggested perhaps the cash was going to Adderall. Seems unlikely—if it were, we'd have our invite by now.

Man, PayPal is totally The Man these days. The payments processor has put the freeze on everyone from Wikileaks to Occupy Wall Street, and most recently put a lock on about $45,000 for NYU-hatched anti-social network Diaspora’s community-donated funds. "Thousands of Diaspora supporters tweeted and emailed the payments company, urging that the funds be released," DIaspora's Peter Schurman said in a press release. "PayPal has sent an email to Diaspora* announcing that its account has been restored.  A PayPal executive also apologized repeatedly during a phone call with Diaspora."

Diaspora* had switched to a PayPal competitor, the startup Stripe, immediately following the freeze by PayPal. Diaspora will continue accepting donations via Stripe and PayPal.

Guess when you spend most of your energies taking on Facebook and Google+, PayPal seems like small potatoes. "We really appreciate the outpouring of community support for Diaspora* in the face of unfair treatment from PayPal.  The fact that we won so quickly just shows what an engaged, passionate online community can do," CEO Yosem Companys said in the release.

No Kickstarter this time. But Diaspora, the NYU-engendered, Bay Area-incubated, occasional Facebook shit-talking startup is asking for money, again, after a protracted development period. Last night, Diaspora blasted out an email to users. "You’ve been incredibly patient in waiting for an invitation. We’re still working as fast as we can to get yours to you, and we’re sorry it’s taking so long," they wrote. "In the meantime, though, we’re reaching out to ask if you’d be willing to help us go faster."

"Can you contribute $25--or any other amount you feel comfortable with?"

The money goes to the Diaspora Foundation. We're going to bet this is a bad idea. The Diaspora team got on the order of $200,000 when they initially asked for $10,000 last year, and the product isn't done. We're skeptical that users will pony up more.

Also, if you can give any amount at all, we’ll be sure to get you an invitation to join us at joindiaspora.com right away. (Just to be clear, you’ll still get your invitation regardless. But if you make a gift, we’ll get it to you now, so you won’t have to wait any longer.)

This thing about dangling invites over users' heads? Pretty annoying, Diaspora. Sorry--Diaspora*.

Remember when Google+ stole Diaspora's thunder? Well there's still something the indie social network's got that Google ain't. Diaspora recently broke its silence is sending out alpha invitations through October and has been sending alpha users long, high-minded emails about privacy on the web and freedom of data that often contain sly or outright references to Facebook. Last night's email linked to an article on Inc.com called "Facebook is the most hated social media company."

The "Circles" feature on Google+ is very similar to Diaspora's "Aspects," so Diaspora is now emphasizing other features of its service--the fact that it's distributed, gives you ownership and total control over your own data, and use Diaspora as a home base for posts to Twitter and Tumblr.

But they seem to be putting the strongest emphasis on pseudonymity, which Google+ policy strictly prohibits.

You can go by whatever name you like on Diaspora*. Pseudonyms are fine, and this both protects you (if you want to say something your boss or your parents disagree with) and opens the door to real connection.

All well and good, but Diaspora has taken more than twice as long as expected to get the service to a usable MVP. Even now it hasn't sent out all its alpha invites.The process to set up your own server--supposedly one of Diaspora's main draws--is reportedly atrocious and difficult. Diaspora should get everyone at least using a working product before it rhetorically goes after its competitors.