Facebook rival Diaspora’s co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy dies at 22

  • One of four friends from NYU who launched site meant to protect users’ privacy

  • Group raised more than $ 200,000 in donations#

  • Cause of death unknown

By Jessica Satherley

Last updated at 3:39 PM on 14th November 2011

A 22-year-old social networking pioneer and Internet privacy advocate who dared to challenge Facebook and Google has died.

Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of the founders Diaspora*, a new social networking site meant to give user more control of their information online, passed away suddenly on Saturday but the details of his death have not been released.

Mr Zhitomirskiy believed he could change the world by using software code that was open to everyone and making programs that protected users’ privacy.

SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO

Ilya Zhitomirskiy

Pioneer: lya Zhitomirskiy believed he could change the world by giving users more privacy and more control in social networking

He and three friends, Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, and Raphael Sofaer, launched a trial run of Diaspora* last year that attracted the attention of The New York Times and National Public Radio and left the tech world buzzing.

They are all students at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Mr Zhitomirskiy described himself on his Twitter account as a ‘free culture and open web enthusiast. Now one of the four Diaspora* bros.’

Friends and fans of Mr Zhitomirskiy have written tributes on Twitter after hearing of his death, with one posting: ‘Death of a young entrepreneur is a great loss to the community.’

Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the man Mr Zhitomirskiy hoped to put out of business, mourned his death.

‘Ilya Zhitomirskiy was a brilliant mind, and it’s a terrible loss for both Diaspora and the technology world,’ he wrote on Twitter.

llya Zhitomirskiy

Coder: Mr Zhitomirskiy was obsessed with Internet privacy, but focused on drawing ‘normal’ people to his social network site

The four students announced their software programme in April 2010 and raised over $ 200,000 for the project through the online fundraising system Kickstarter.

Young and brilliant

  Mr Zhitomirskiy wasn’t the only programmer to achieve great things in his early years:

  • Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook at 19.
  • Linus Torvalds created Linux, an open-source operating system at 22
  • Andrey Ternovskiy was 17 when he made Chatroulette
  • Christopher Poole was 15 when he made 4Chan, a chatboard that has been called ‘ground zero of Western web culture.’

The system even inspired Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to donate money to the project.

In November 2010 the foursome released a consumer alpha version of the programme, while still making further developments.

Diaspora* is based around privacy concerns related to centralised social networks by allowing users to set up their own servers to host content and then interact with others by sharing status updates, photographs and other data – much like Facebook.

Social networking pioneers

Four friends: Four New York University students launched Diaspora*: (from left to right) Maxwell Salzberg, Daniel Grippi, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy

But Diaspora* is different because sites like Facebook and Google store user data within their own networks and own whatever data users upload.

Mr Zhitomirskiy was a hardcore computer programmer, obsessed with Internet security and maintaining privacy online.

But since he began working on Diaspora*, he began focusing on user interfaces and started thinking about how to lure ‘normal’ users away from Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg

Admirer: Facebook chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated money to Diaspora*, even though the project aimed to put him out of business

‘We want to move people from websites that are not healthy to websites that are more healthy, because they’re transparent,’ Mr Zhitomirskiy told New York magazine last year.

‘Even though a nontechnical person may not understand it, they’ll know there’s a community that has said, this is okay.’

Co-founder Raphael Sofaer told the New York Times last year: ‘In our real lives, we talk to each other.

‘We don’t need to hand our messages to a hub. What Facebook gives you as a user isn’t that hard to do.

‘All the little games, the little walls, the little chat, aren’t really rare things. The technology already exists.’

While Zuckerberg praised the group, telling Wired last year: ‘I think it is cool people are trying to do it.

‘I see a little of myself in them. It’s just their approach that the world could be better and saying, ‘We should try to do it’.’

Incoming search terms:

Share|