My name is Mike – I’m married, and have 3 children, and a teenager who uses facebook daily, and know all of the privacy concerns of a Parent, not including my own privacy concerns of course. I’m a 36 year old, Senior Software Engineer, and have been programming since I was 8 years old.

I was intending on approaching Kickstarter, until I realized that you needed an address in the USA as well as a Bank Account. I also wondered how I could use it, being a Canadian Citizen. I’m pretty sure I am out of luck, however, it will not stop me from my goal to raise enough funding to get my idea into play.

Funding Goal: $15,000.00, time line to reach this goal is less than 2 months from this day (August 19th, 2010 to October 1st 2010). I intend on iteration #1 coming out shortly after the movie about facebook “Social Network” comes out.

Project Description
I want to create a social platform for people who are interested in sharing their information with others. There are currently many sites out there that currently do this, such as Facebook, and the upcoming Diaspora. It can be done much better.

Although Diaspora is looking to fix all of the Privacy related problems Facebook has today, many users simply don’t want to install any software to access a social site, nor would a larger percentage of the users even want to pay for hosting their information. I know my Aunt, and Grandmother wouldn’t be able to do this, yet they are on Facebook today. I believe a site like Facebook can be successful with users, and fix all of the privacy related problems we see today, without the need for a Diaspora like network.

A site like Facebook doesn’t have to be complicated, it’s source code just needs to be open, and the data needs to be hosted in a secure environment. Privacy would be paramount, and default options on a new account would have to be set to paranoid. Information must remain the property of the end user, and follow the rules of the users consent. This service would forever remain free, and open source, however, it would need to rely on donations, or sponsors without any corporate ‘hitches’, or advertising promises.

The $15,000.00 I am asking for, would be to pay for the initial co-location hosting, some website design (graphics and site design), as well as used servers. The company I currently am employed with is willing to sell me blade servers for $500.00 per server (fully loaded with 20 blades per server). The rest will be used as listed below, with the remaining to be banked in an interest bearing account to cover any replacement hardware, continued hosting, or any smaller unexpected costs.

Here is the breakdown for the money I am looking for:
4 x Blade Servers = $2,000.00 (used, but great condition)
Server Enclosure = $1,000.00
2 Rack-mount Uninteruptable Power Supplies = $1,000.00
1 Years Hosting & Bandwidth = $6,000.00
Logo & Graphical Site Design = $1,000.00

The total amount of money for equipment would account for approximately $4,000.00, I am going to buy what I can on eBay, to get the most value for the dollar. I intend on hosting the servers at a secure facility, which I am getting an insane deal on; an entire rack space for approximately $500.00/month as we have some finer details to work-out. The hosting accounts for $6,000.00.

There is no money set aside for the development of the project, as I will be releasing iteration #1 shortly after everything is setup, and open sourcing the code to allow the community to help contribute.

One could argue that this could be done on the Cloud, for much cheaper, however, I prefer full control of where the data resides, and how it is being used. The only way to insure this, is to keep it on a highly secure system, where the data can be processed without worry of data being accessed by Cloud Employees, in their debugging processes, etc.

Ongoing costs, after the first year, will be covered on a donation basis much like Wikipedia does. There will be no revenue incentive to the site. The site will simply continue to grow, and allow people to communicate with one another, without the corporate hiccups, or privacy concerns.

Project Rewards
See below the donation button below.

Insufficient Funds
If for some reason, funding comes up short of my goal, I’ll do the best with what I have (perhaps cut out hardware, or reduce our hosting footprint).

Finishing up
I have certainly not covered everything here, and perhaps may have missed a few things. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to leave them below.

If you would like to donate, follow the Paypal button below.

diaspora · facebook · friendherd.com · social networking