More Awesome Than Money: Four Boys and Their Heroic Quest to Save Your Privacy from Facebook

Jim Dwyer

Penguin, Oct 16, 2014 - Business & Economics - 384 pages

Can Facebook be trusted with your data? Years ahead of their time, Diaspora tried to do better. This is their David-versus-Goliath effort to build a revolutionary social network that would give us back control of our privacy.
 
In June of 2010, four nerdy NYU undergrads moved to Silicon Valley to save the world from Facebook. Their idea was simple—to build a social network that would allow users to control the information they shared about themselves instead of surrendering it to big business. Their project was called Diaspora, and just weeks after launching it on Kickstarter, the idealistic twenty-year-olds had raised $200,000 from donors around the world. Profiled in the New York Times, wooed by venture capitalists, and cheered on by the elite of the digital community, they were poised to revolutionize the Internet and remap the lines of power in our digital society—until things fell apart, with tragic results.

The story of Diaspora reaches far beyond Silicon Valley to today’s urgent debates over the future of the Internet. In this heartbreaking yet hopeful account, drawn from extensive interviews with the Diaspora Four and other key figures, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jim Dwyer tells a riveting tale of four ambitious and naive young men who dared to challenge the status quo. 

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - mamzel - LibraryThing

This book follows the process of an internet start up by describing the life of Diaspora*, a social network that tries to return privacy to a person's account. Aggravated by the way that Facebook ...

MORE AWESOME THAN MONEY: Four Boys and Their Heroic Quest to Save Your Privacy from Facebook

User Review  - Kirkus

Journalistic account of an ambitious, ill-fated attempt at creating a privacy-oriented alternative to Facebook.New York Times columnist Dwyer (co-author: 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to ...

About the author

Jim Dwyer is a Pulitzer Prize--winning reporter who writes the "About New York" column for The New York Times. He has written or co-written six books, including 102 Minutes, which spent twelve weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. He lives in New York City.

Bibliographic information

• Title: More Awesome Than Money: Four Boys and Their Heroic Quest to Save Your Privacy from Facebook
• Author: Jim Dwyer
• Publisher: Penguin, 2014
• ISBN: 0698176308, 9780698176300
• Length: 384 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Industries / Media & Communications; Computers / Social Aspects; Technology & Engineering / Social Aspects