Dave Haft

Join Mashable for an informal open gathering after Google I/O on Thursday, May 20th starting at 8:00 PM PT at the Roe Nightclub in San Francisco. Come hang with the Mashable SF team, including Founder/CEO Pete Cashmore, Social Media & Tech Reporter Jolie O’Dell, and me, Co-Editor Ben Parr!

MashMeet San Francisco will be an open networking event — free admission for all! However, we encourage any company who wants to sponsor the event to come forward and email us at “events[at]mashable” to help cover some drinks for our guests. It will be worth it, we promise!

Interested in coming? Just let everyone know you’re attending either on our Eventbrite page or on our Facebook Event page. It’s going to be a blast, so don’t miss out!

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Details:

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Date: Thursday, May 20th, 2010
Time: 8:00 PM – 11:00 PM PT
Location: Roe, 651 Howard Street in San Francisco, CA (near the location of GoogleGoogle I/O in SOMA)
RSVP: RSVP on Facebook or on Eventbrite
Mashable Team: Founder and CEO Pete Cashmore, Co-Editor Ben Parr, Social Mediasocial media & Technology Reporter Jolie O’Dell

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For more social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on TwitterTwitter or become a fan on FacebookFacebook

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Four New York University students have a vision to build Diaspora, “an open source personal web service that will put individuals in control of their data,” or essentially the anti-Facebook.

They started with just a dream and a prayer — that prayer was to raise $10,000 by June 1 so that they could spend the summer making their vision a reality. They reached that goal in just 12 days.

Now, still more than two weeks away from their deadline, the team of programmers has already broke $100,000, collected via the fundraising platform Kickstarter.

Team Diaspora — college kids Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Ilya Zhitomirskiy and Raphael Sofaer — believe that sharing information online and maintaining one’s privacy should not have to be mutually exclusive. What they set out to build is a network that allows everyone to install their own “seed” — i.e. a personal web server with a user’s photos, videos and everything else — within the larger network. That seed would be fully owned and controlled by the user, so the user could share anything and still maintain ownership over it.

What it looks like remains to be seen, but this answer to current FacebookFacebook culture has a hit nerve with the more than 2,300 individuals who have agreed to back the company with as little as five bucks.

Now that the guys have reached their goal, we expect them to fulfill their promise and forgo all fun this summer to build their pet project. In a few months time we should see what $100,000 and a powerful vision can produce.

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For more social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on TwitterTwitter or become a fan on Facebook

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Did you know that the second most popular Facebook Page is that of Homer Simpson, right behind Michael Jackson? Or that the overall amount of time spent on Facebook each month is 8.3 billion hours? (We shudder to think how much of that time is spent on FarmVille).

If you ever want to impress anyone with your knowledge of Facebook miscellanea, below is the ultimate cheat sheet in the form of a very large infographic. Enjoy!

[via: Online PhD Programs for Mashable.com]

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For more social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on TwitterTwitter or become a fan on FacebookFacebook

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