More Awesome Than Money

August 18, 2014
Journalist Dwyer (102 Minutes) chronicles the noble yet tragic failure of four NYU undergrads who aimed to ignite a social media uprising with Diaspora, an open-source alternative to Facebook. Diaspora took arms against the stealthy business practices of social media companies and provided users control over their personal data. It won immediate support, raising $200,000 dollars through a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign. The book traces the constantly morphing, publicly scrutinized efforts of the founding members over three years. Dwyer fits the 2010 uproar over Facebook’s privacy policies and the dawn of commercial surveillance into a history of the Internet, from the birth of the World Wide Web to the creation of Mozilla’s open-source browser, Firefox, providing context to Diaspora’s herculean task: to meet the expectations of thousands of free-Internet advocates and those of savvy venture capitalists, all in a San Francisco–startup pressure-cooker. But Dwyer is quick to lump his four protagonists—Dan Grippi, Max Salzberg, Rafi Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy—into a category of “man-boys... eating pizza, and hacking at geeky projects.” The emotional stakes are extremely high, and when tragedy strikes, Dwyer’s characterizations lack the development to really make us feel it. Agent: Flip Brophy, Sterling Lord Literistic.

October 1, 2014
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 Survive Inside the Twin Towers, 2004, etc.) lays out the improbable narrative of Diaspora, a project hatched by four New York University students that too quickly gained attention worldwide among digital cognoscenti and "shot like a comet through the venture capital wings of Silicon Valley, but flamed out." The author explores the strong personalities behind it, quintessential millennials with an intense focus on the virtual world (and quirky pursuits like Burning Man). Unfortunately, the most idealistic of the four became so overwhelmed that he committed suicide at age 22, a looming tragedy that checks Dwyer's tone of futurist optimism. At first, Diaspora's bright prospects were due to its open-source software code and a promise of user-controlled data. Suspicious about how Facebook "hoarded and peddled personal information without so much as asking," the founders attracted supporters worldwide. An initial Kickstarter campaign allowed them to set up shop in San Francisco and spend a year coding; however, the four principals thwarted their own ambitions, starting with a disastrous meeting with a venture capital firm that they alienated with a $10 million "ask." As Dwyer notes, "Diaspora did not fall under the standard rubric for evaluating startups." Despite his positive spin (he followed the project from its early days as a columnist), the project never seemed close to practicality. As the rambling narrative follows the crew through many tech-geek happenings and increasingly tense board meetings, the author chronicles how Diaspora's most promising components were ruthlessly emulated by competitors: "Google came out with circles months after Diaspora had introduced the aspects settings, each of them a digital corral...it was a perfect example of how quickly digital innovation could lose its novelty." Ultimately, the increasingly estranged partners entered a venture-capitalist incubator program and were advised to abandon the project, though volunteers continue to develop its source code. Slowly paced, familiar narrative of tech dreams and youthful hubris.

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September 1, 2014
Dwyer, author and reporter, tells the 2010 story of four New York University nerds who were certain that people could connect to friends and networks of friends without going through the servers of Facebook. They set out to build the tools that would save the world from Facebook, calling their project Diaspora. Since Facebook holds and controls data about the lives and social interactions of half a billion people, the four, Dan Grippi, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Max Salzberg, and Rafi Sofaer, aimed to create an alternative that would mean remapping the lines of power in digital society. This is their story, starting with euphoria as their creative plans took shape, money came in, and industry experts monitored them; through their errors and bad decisions; and then, finally, to a devastating personal tragedy. Dwyer reports that Diaspora is now in the hands of other young nerds, but he adds, It remains one of the most active open-source projects in the world. This is a greatly informative book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

May 1, 2014

Ambitious Max, idealistic Ilya, brainiac coder Dan, and on-top-of-everything Rafi: four New York University undergraduates who dreamed of building a social network that would give users control of their own data instead of passing it on to Big Brother corporations like Facebook. But success eluded them, and Ilya eventually committed suicide. From a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2014

Pulitzer Prize winner Dwyer (columnist, New York Times; coauthor, 102 Minutes) follows a group of New York University students through the trials and tribulations of the tech start-up process. After a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign for their project "Diaspora"--a distributed social networking tool that was dubbed a "Facebook-killer" for its privacy consciousness and distributed model of data retention--the group moved to the Bay Area to code the project and secure additional venture funding. Like many start-ups, the attempts that followed at raising additional capital weren't met with the same success as the Kickstarter campaign. While Dwyer narrates how the company navigates their Bay Area adventures, the reader is offered a rare insider account of how start-ups face do-or-die decisions in their critical formative years. VERDICT A thoroughly compelling account recommended for those interested in general technology books and business narratives. This book is a welcome addition to the literature on start-ups, particularly for its focus on notions of privacy in the digital era and how entrepreneurs are working to address these critical needs. [See Prepub Alert, 4/14/14.]--Jim Hahn, Univ. Lib., Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.