What Google's autocomplete feature showed when I began typing "How do I qui..."

Creating a Network Like Facebook, Only Private. NYT.

Working with Mr. Salzberg and Mr. Grippi are Raphael Sofaer, 19, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 20 -- "four talented young nerds," Mr. Salzberg says -- all of whom met at New York University's Courant Institute. They have called their project Diaspora* and intend to distribute the software free, and to make the code openly available so that other programmers can build on it. As they describe it, the Diaspora* software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share. Mr. Sofaer says that centralized networks like Facebook are not necessary. "In our real lives, we talk to each other," he said. "We don't need to hand our messages to a hub. What Facebook gives you as a user isn't all that hard to do. All the little games, the little walls, the little chat, aren't really rare things. The technology already exists."

The terms of the bargain people make with social networks -- you swap personal information for convenient access to their sites -- have been shifting, with the companies that operate the networks collecting ever more information about their users. That information can be sold to marketers. Some younger people are becoming more cautious about what they post. "When you give up that data, you're giving it up forever," Mr. Salzberg said. "The value they give us is negligible in the scale of what they are doing, and what we are giving up is all of our privacy."

The Diaspora* group was inspired to begin their project after hearing a talk by Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University, who described the centralized social networks as "spying for free," Mr. Salzberg said.

They're right. We don't need Facebook to connect any more than we needed AOL's closed network to mediate the Web way back when. They're both training wheels for using technology new to us.

More: Decentralize the web with Diaspora
join diaspora - the project
Twitter: joindiaspora

Update: From the BBC (The anti-Facebook) comes this tidbit:

Read Write Web's Marshall Kirkpatrick reports that, "Google Suggest, the drop-down box that offers suggested search query completions based on absolute and recent upticks of popularity, now guesses that if you start typing 'How do I...' that you'd like to know how to quit Facebook".

And Alison Diana at InformationWeek.com reported that "the phrase "how to quit Facebook" generated 16.9 million results in a Google search Tuesday morning, while "how do I delete my Facebook account?" resulted in 15.9 million links".

I tried it, and the screenshot is at the top of the page. Farmville and Mafia Wars are Facebook games.