One of the four co-founder of the social network Diaspora, Ilya Zhitomirisky died over the weekend in San Francisco at a very young age of 22.
ABC News reports :-
His death was “a possible suicide,” said Officer Albie Esparza of the San Francisco Police Department, in a telephone interview with ABC News. She said police were first called on Saturday night.
She said the case had been referred to the San Francisco Medical Examiner’s office, which might need a couple of days to finish tests and confirm what had happened.
Ilya Zhitomirisky along with his three New York Univerity friends, Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg and Raphael Sofear launched a trial version of Diaspora last year which left the tech world buzzing.
Their main objective of making another social network “Diaspora” was to focus on privacy which Facebook fails to be clear about. Diaspora is also based upon allowing users to set up their own servers to host content and interacting with friends like Facebook, but is different in a sense that whatever pictures and data you post on Facebook etc, store that into their network which makes privacy a complex matter.
Despite their effort of competing with Facebook , Mark Zukerberg praised their effort of giving something new to the users. He told Wired last year,
I think it is cool people are trying to do it
The make this project a reality they started fund raising campaigns to support this endeavor, they raised over $10,000 in 12 days and raised a total of $200,000 from 6,500 donors in 39 days. One of the donors also included Mark Zuckerberg.
Discussing about their project , Mr.Zhitomirisky told New York Times last year :-
We want to move people from websites that are not healthy to websites that are more healthy, because they’re transparent
Even though a nontechnical person may not understand it, they’ll know there’s a community that has said, this is okay.
While Co-founder Raphael Sofaer told NY Times last year:-
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.
Sincerest Condolences from our team here at CHIPHAZARD to the late co-founder of Diaspora’s team, family and friends. May his soul Rest In Peace ! .
This is really shocking. I am deeply saddened to know about his death. He was a visionary, and I was looking forward for Diaspora to flourish big time. Lets see how things go along!
Sad when people like him go to such extremes. Everyone has his/her hardships of life, but to end them like this is extremely terrible. He had everything, yet he ended his life by choosing the “darker path”. Still, may his soul rest in peace.
I could never imagine a young man of such a tender age could be doing things so big. And it is more shocking for me to learn that he died so early, when he had so much to do. Really tragic..
Sad when people like him go to such extremes. Everyone has his/her hardships of life, but to end them like this is extremely terrible. He had everything, yet he ended his life by choosing the “darker path”. Still, may his soul rest in peace.
+1