Diaspora* is another social networking site (nearly a year old) … just like facebook, with one important exception. Here is an excerpt from a New York Magazine article:

… as the name suggests, their project was intended less as an imitation of Facebook than as an escape route from it—a path to freedom for those who had come to fear the dark side of the social network. In the years since Facebook launched (and long before Aaron Sorkin decided to take a whack at it), the service had begun to feel unsettling, sinister, less a benign link to friends and more a stealth database, open to all takers.

Diaspora*—if it worked—would do everything Facebook did. But users would own their data.

Will google+ close the coffin on Diaspora*?